the secret of the veda - sri aurobindo ashram

15

The Secret of the Veda

© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1998Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department

Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, PondicherryPRINTED IN INDIA

VOLUME 15THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO


with Selected Hymns

Publisher’s Note

This volume comprises Sri Aurobindo’s writings on and transla-tions of the Rig Veda that were published in the monthly reviewArya between 1914 and 1920. Most of this material appearedunder three headings:

The Secret of the Veda, August 1914 – July 1916.Selected Hymns, August 1914 – July 1915.Hymns of the Atris, August 1915 – December 1917.

These series form the first three parts of the present volume.Other translations of Vedic hymns that came out in the Arya,but not under any of the above headings, make up Part Four. SriAurobindo’s Vedic writings and translations that did not appearin the Arya are published in Vedic Studies with Writings onPhilology and Hymns to the Mystic Fire, volumes 14 and 16 ofTHE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO.

Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry

CONTENTS

PART ONE

THE SECRET OF THE VEDA

IThe Problem and Its Solution 3

IIA Retrospect of Vedic Theory 10

IIIModern Theories 24

IVThe Foundations of the Psychological Theory 34

VThe Philological Method of the Veda 48

VIAgni and the Truth 58

VIIVaruna-Mitra and the Truth 70

VIIIThe Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas 80

IXSaraswati and Her Consorts 91

XThe Image of the Oceans and the Rivers 100

XIThe Seven Rivers 109

CONTENTS

XIIThe Herds of the Dawn 123

XIIIDawn and the Truth 131

XIVThe Cow and the Angiras Legend 138

XVThe Lost Sun and the Lost Cows 149

XVIThe Angiras Rishis 159

XVIIThe Seven-Headed Thought, Swar and the Dashagwas 173

XVIIIThe Human Fathers 187

XIXThe Victory of the Fathers 199

XXThe Hound of Heaven 211

XXIThe Sons of Darkness 223

XXIIThe Conquest over the Dasyus 232

XXIIISummary of Conclusions 241

PART TWO

SELECTED HYMNS

IThe Colloquy of Indra and Agastya (I.170) 253

CONTENTS

IIIndra, Giver of Light (I.4) 257

IIIIndra and the Thought-Forces (I.171) 266

IVAgni, the Illumined Will (I.77) 276

VSurya Savitri, Creator and Increaser (V.81) 285

VIThe Divine Dawn (III.61) 293

VIITo Bhaga Savitri, the Enjoyer (V.82) 299

VIIIVayu, the Master of the Life Energies (IV.48) 306

IXBrihaspati, Power of the Soul (IV.50) 315

XThe Ashwins, Lords of Bliss (IV.45) 326

XIThe Ribhus, Artisans of Immortality (I.20) 336

XIIVishnu, the All-Pervading Godhead (I.154) 343

XIIISoma, Lord of Delight and Immortality (IX.83) 351

PART THREE

HYMNS OF THE ATRISForeword 363

The Doctrine of the Mystics 370

CONTENTS

Hymns to AgniAgni, the Divine Will-Force 387

Hymns to Agni (V.1 – 28) 393

Hymns to the Lords of LightThe Guardians of the Light 473

Hymns to Mitra-Varuna (V.62 – 72) 518

Hymn to Varuna (V.85) 544

Hymns to the Dawn (V.79, 80) 549

A Hymn to Savitri (V.81) 555

PART FOUR

OTHER HYMNSA Vedic Hymn (VII.60) 559

A Hymn of the Thought-Gods (based on V.52 – 61) 562

The God of the Mystic Wine (IX.75, 42) 565The Vedic Fire (I.94, 97) 568

A Vedic Hymn to the Fire (I.59) 574

Parashara’s Hymns to the Lord of the Flame (I.65 – 73) 576

APPENDIXInterpretation of the Veda 593

Part One


Chapter I

The Problem and Its Solution

IS THERE at all or is there still a secret of the Veda?According to current conceptions the heart of that an-

cient mystery has been plucked out and revealed to the gazeof all, or rather no real secret ever existed. The hymns of theVeda are the sacrificial compositions of a primitive and stillbarbarous race written around a system of ceremonial and pro-pitiatory rites, addressed to personified Powers of Nature andreplete with a confused mass of half-formed myth and crude as-tronomical allegories yet in the making. Only in the later hymnsdo we perceive the first appearance of deeper psychological andmoral ideas — borrowed, some think, from the hostile Dravidi-ans, the “robbers” and “Veda-haters” freely cursed in the hymnsthemselves, — and, however acquired, the first seed of the laterVedantic speculations. This modern theory is in accord with thereceived idea of a rapid human evolution from the quite recentsavage; it is supported by an imposing apparatus of critical re-search and upheld by a number of Sciences, unhappily still youngand still largely conjectural in their methods and shifting in theirresults, — Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology andthe Science of Comparative Religion.

It is my object in these chapters to suggest a new view ofthe ancient problem. I do not propose to use a negative anddestructive method directed against the received solutions, butsimply to present, positively and constructively, a larger and,in some sort, a complementary hypothesis built upon broaderfoundations, — a hypothesis which, in addition, may shed lighton one or two important problems in the history of ancientthought and cult left very insufficiently solved by the ordinarytheories.

We have in the Rig Veda, — the true and only Veda in theestimation of European scholars, — a body of sacrificial hymns

4 The Secret of the Veda

couched in a very ancient language which presents a numberof almost insoluble difficulties. It is full of ancient forms andwords which do not appear in later speech and have oftento be fixed in some doubtful sense by intelligent conjecture;a mass even of the words that it has in common with classicalSanskrit seem to bear or at least to admit another significancethan in the later literary tongue; and a multitude of its voca-bles, especially the most common, those which are most vital tothe sense, are capable of a surprising number of unconnectedsignificances which may give, according to our preference inselection, quite different complexions to whole passages, wholehymns and even to the whole thought of the Veda. In the courseof several thousands of years there have been at least three con-siderable attempts, entirely differing from each other in theirmethods and results, to fix the sense of these ancient litanies.One of these is prehistoric in time and exists only by fragmentsin the Brahmanas and Upanishads; but we possess in its entiretythe traditional interpretation of the Indian scholar Sayana andwe have in our own day the interpretation constructed afteran immense labour of comparison and conjecture by modernEuropean scholarship. Both of them present one characteristicin common, the extraordinary incoherence and poverty of sensewhich their results stamp upon the ancient hymns. The separatelines can be given, whether naturally or by force of conjecture,a good sense or a sense that hangs together; the diction thatresults, if garish in style, if loaded with otiose and decorativeepithets, if developing extraordinarily little of meaning in anamazing mass of gaudy figure and verbiage, can be made to runinto intelligible sentences; but when we come to read the hymnsas a whole we seem to be in the presence of men who, unlikethe early writers of other races, were incapable of coherent andnatural expression or of connected thought. Except in the brieferand simpler hymns, the language tends to be either obscure orartificial; the thoughts are either unconnected or have to beforced and beaten by the interpreter into a whole. The scholarin dealing with his text is obliged to substitute for interpretationa process almost of fabrication. We feel that he is not so much

The Problem and Its Solution 5

revealing the sense as hammering and forging rebellious materialinto some sort of shape and consistency.

Yet these obscure and barbarous compositions have had themost splendid good fortune in all literary history. They have beenthe reputed source not only of some of the world’s richest andprofoundest religions, but of some of its subtlest metaphysicalphilosophies. In the fixed tradition of thousands of years theyhave been revered as the origin and standard of all that canbe held as authoritative and true in Brahmana and Upanishad,in Tantra and Purana, in the doctrines of great philosophicalschools and in the teachings of famous saints and sages. Thename borne by them was Veda, the knowledge, — the receivedname for the highest spiritual truth of which the human mindis capable. But if we accept the current interpretations, whetherSayana’s or the modern theory, the whole of this sublime andsacred reputation is a colossal fiction. The hymns are, on thecontrary, nothing more than the naive superstitious fancies ofuntaught and materialistic barbarians concerned only with themost external gains and enjoyments and ignorant of all but themost elementary moral notions or religious aspirations. Nordo occasional passages, quite out of harmony with their gen-eral spirit, destroy this total impression. The true foundationor starting-point of the later religions and philosophies is theUpanishads, which have then to be conceived as a revolt of philo-sophical and speculative minds against the ritualistic materialismof the Vedas.

But this conception, supported by misleading Europeanparallels, really explains nothing. Such profound and ultimatethoughts, such systems of subtle and elaborate psychology as arefound in the substance of the Upanishads, do not spring out ofa previous void. The human mind in its progress marches fromknowledge to knowledge, or it renews and enlarges previousknowledge that has been obscured and overlaid, or it seizes onold imperfect clues and is led by them to new discoveries. Thethought of the Upanishads supposes great origins anterior toitself, and these in the ordinary theories are lacking. The hy-pothesis, invented to fill the gap, that these ideas were borrowed


by barbarous Aryan invaders from the civilised Dravidians, isa conjecture supported only by other conjectures. It is indeedcoming to be doubted whether the whole story of an Aryaninvasion through the Punjab is not a myth of the philologists.

Now, in ancient Europe the schools of intellectual philoso-phy were preceded by the secret doctrines of the mystics; Orphicand Eleusinian mysteries prepared the rich soil of mentality outof which sprang Pythagoras and Plato. A similar starting-pointis at least probable for the later march of thought in India. Muchindeed of the forms and symbols of thought which we find in theUpanishads, much of the substance of the Brahmanas supposesa period in India in which thought took the form or the veil ofsecret teachings such as those of the Greek mysteries.

Another hiatus left by the received theories is the gulf thatdivides the material worship of external Nature-Powers in theVeda from the developed religion of the Greeks and from thepsychological and spiritual ideas we find attached to the func-tions of the Gods in the Upanishads and Puranas. We may acceptfor the present the theory that the earliest fully intelligent formof human religion is necessarily, — since man on earth beginsfrom the external and proceeds to the internal, — a worship ofoutward Nature-Powers invested with the consciousness and thepersonality that he finds in his own being.

Agni in the Veda is avowedly Fire; Surya is the Sun, Parjanyathe Raincloud, Usha the Dawn; and if the material origin orfunction of some other Gods is less trenchantly clear, it is easy torender the obscure precise by philological inferences or ingeniousspeculation. But when we come to the worship of the Greeksnot much later in date than the Veda, according to modernideas of chronology, we find a significant change. The materialattributes of the Gods are effaced or have become subordinateto psychological conceptions. The impetuous God of Fire hasbeen converted into a lame God of Labour; Apollo, the Sun,presides over poetical and prophetic inspiration; Athene, whomay plausibly be identified as in origin a Dawn-Goddess, haslost all memory of her material functions and is the wise, strongand pure Goddess of Knowledge; and there are other deities


also, Gods of War, Love, Beauty, whose material functions havedisappeared if they ever existed. It is not enough to say that thischange was inevitable with the progress of human civilisation:the process also of the change demands inquiry and elucidation.We see the same revolution effected in the Puranas partly by thesubstitution of other divine names and figures, but also in partby the same obscure process that we observe in the evolution ofGreek mythology. The river Saraswati has become the Muse andGoddess of Learning; Vishnu and Rudra of the Vedas are nowthe supreme Godhead, members of a divine Triad and expressiveseparately of conservative and destructive process in the cosmos.In the Isha Upanishad we find an appeal to Surya as a God ofrevelatory knowledge by whose action we can arrive at the high-est truth. This, too, is his function in the sacred Vedic formulaof the Gayatri which was for thousands of years repeated byevery Brahmin in his daily meditation; and we may note thatthis formula is a verse from the Rig Veda, from a hymn of theRishi Vishwamitra. In the same Upanishad, Agni is invoked forpurely moral functions as the purifier from sin, the leader of thesoul by the good path to the divine Bliss, and he seems to beidentified with the power of the will and responsible for humanactions. In other Upanishads the Gods are clearly the symbols ofsense-functions in man. Soma, the plant which yielded the mysticwine for the Vedic sacrifice, has become not only the God of themoon, but manifests himself as mind in the human being. Theseevolutions suppose some period, posterior to the early materialworship or superior Pantheistic Animism attributed to the Vedasand prior to the developed Puranic mythology, in which the godsbecame invested with deeper psychological functions, a periodwhich may well have been the Age of the Mysteries. As thingsstand, a gap is left or else has been created by our exclusivepreoccupation with the naturalistic element in the religion ofthe Vedic Rishis.

I suggest that the gulf is of our own creation and doesnot really exist in the ancient sacred writings. The hypothesisI propose is that the Rig Veda is itself the one considerabledocument that remains to us from the early period of human


thought of which the historic Eleusinian and Orphic mysterieswere the failing remnants, when the spiritual and psychologicalknowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now diffi-cult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figuresand symbols which protected the sense from the profane andrevealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of themystics was the sacredness and secrecy of self-knowledge andthe true knowledge of the Gods. This wisdom was, they thought,unfit, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary human mind orin any case liable to perversion and misuse and loss of virtue ifrevealed to vulgar and unpurified spirits. Hence they favouredthe existence of an outer worship, effective but imperfect, forthe profane, an inner discipline for the initiate, and clothed theirlanguage in words and images which had, equally, a spiritualsense for the elect, a concrete sense for the mass of ordinaryworshippers. The Vedic hymns were conceived and constructedon this principle. Their formulas and ceremonies are, overtly, thedetails of an outward ritual devised for the Pantheistic Nature-Worship which was then the common religion, covertly thesacred words, the effective symbols of a spiritual experience andknowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture whichwere then the highest achievement of the human race. The ritualsystem recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand; thenaturalistic sense discovered by European scholarship may, inits general conceptions, be accepted; but behind them there isalways the true and still hidden secret of the Veda, — the secretwords, nin. ya vacamsi, which were spoken for the purified in souland the awakened in knowledge. To disengage this less obviousbut more important sense by fixing the import of Vedic terms,the sense of Vedic symbols and the psychological functions ofthe Gods is thus a difficult but necessary task, for which thesechapters and the translations that accompany them are only apreparation.

The hypothesis, if it proves to be valid, will have three ad-vantages. It will elucidate simply and effectively the parts of theUpanishads that remain yet unintelligible or ill-understood aswell as much of the origins of the Puranas. It will explain and


justify rationally the whole ancient tradition of India; for it willbe found that, in sober truth, the Vedanta, Purana, Tantra, thephilosophical schools and the great Indian religions do go backin their source to Vedic origins. We can see there in their originalseed or in their early or even primitive forms the fundamentalconceptions of later Indian thought. Thus a natural starting-point will be provided for a sounder study of ComparativeReligion in the Indian field. Instead of wandering amid insecurespeculations or having to account for impossible conversionsand unexplained transitions we shall have a clue to a natural andprogressive development satisfying to the reason. Incidentally,some light may be thrown on the obscurities of early cult andmyth in other ancient nations. Finally, the incoherencies of theVedic texts will at once be explained and disappear. They existin appearance only, because the real thread of the sense is to befound in an inner meaning. That thread found, the hymns appearas logical and organic wholes and the expression, though alienin type to our modern ways of thinking and speaking, becomes,in its own style, just and precise and sins rather by economy ofphrase than by excess, by over-pregnancy rather than by povertyof sense. The Veda ceases to be merely an interesting remnantof barbarism and takes rank among the most important of theworld’s early Scriptures.

Chapter II

A Retrospect of Vedic Theory

VEDA, then, is the creation of an age anterior to our in-tellectual philosophies. In that original epoch thoughtproceeded by other methods than those of our logical

reasoning and speech accepted modes of expression which inour modern habits would be inadmissible. The wisest then de-pended on inner experience and the suggestions of the intuitivemind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind’s ordinaryperceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, notlogical conviction, their ideal the inspired seer, not the accuratereasoner. Indian tradition has faithfully preserved this accountof the origin of the Vedas. The Rishi was not the individual com-poser of the hymn, but the seer (dras.t.a) of an eternal truth andan impersonal knowledge. The language of Veda itself is Sruti, arhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Wordthat came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience ofthe man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonalknowledge. The words themselves, dr.s.t.i and sruti, sight andhearing, are Vedic expressions; these and cognate words signify,in the esoteric terminology of the hymns, revelatory knowledgeand the contents of inspiration.

In the Vedic idea of the revelation there is no suggestion ofthe miraculous or the supernatural. The Rishi who employedthese faculties, had acquired them by a progressive self-culture.Knowledge itself was a travelling and a reaching, or a findingand a winning; the revelation came only at the end, the light wasthe prize of a final victory. There is continually in the Veda thisimage of the journey, the soul’s march on the path of Truth. Onthat path, as it advances, it also ascends; new vistas of powerand light open to its aspiration; it wins by a heroic effort itsenlarged spiritual possessions.

From the historical point of view the Rig Veda may be

A Retrospect of Vedic Theory 11

regarded as a record of a great advance made by humanityby special means at a certain period of its collective progress.In its esoteric, as well as its exoteric significance, it is the Bookof Works, of the inner and the outer sacrifice; it is the spirit’shymn of battle and victory as it discovers and climbs to planesof thought and experience inaccessible to the natural or animalman, man’s praise of the divine Light, Power and Grace at workin the mortal. It is far, therefore, from being an attempt to setdown the results of intellectual or imaginative speculation, nordoes it consist of the dogmas of a primitive religion. Only, out ofthe sameness of experience and out of the impersonality of theknowledge received, there arise a fixed body of conceptions con-stantly repeated and a fixed symbolic language which, perhaps,in that early human speech, was the inevitable form of these con-ceptions because alone capable by its combined concreteness andpower of mystic suggestion of expressing that which for the or-dinary mind of the race was inexpressible. We have, at any rate,the same notions repeated from hymn to hymn with the sameconstant terms and figures and frequently in the same phraseswith an entire indifference to any search for poetical originalityor any demand for novelty of thought and freshness of language.No pursuit of aesthetic grace, richness or beauty induces thesemystic poets to vary the consecrated form which had become forthem a sort of divine algebra transmitting the eternal formulaeof the Knowledge to the continuous succession of the initiates.

The hymns possess indeed a finished metrical form, a con-stant subtlety and skill in their technique, great variations ofstyle and poetical personality; they are not the work of rude,barbarous and primitive craftsmen, but the living breath of asupreme and conscious Art forming its creations in the puissantbut well-governed movement of a self-observing inspiration.Still, all these high gifts have deliberately been exercised withinone unvarying framework and always with the same materials.For the art of expression was to the Rishis only a means, notan aim; their principal preoccupation was strenuously practical,almost utilitarian, in the highest sense of utility. The hymn wasto the Rishi who composed it a means of spiritual progress


for himself and for others. It rose out of his soul, it becamea power of his mind, it was the vehicle of his self-expressionin some important or even critical moment of his life’s innerhistory. It helped him to express the god in him, to destroy thedevourer, the expresser of evil; it became a weapon in the handsof the Aryan striver after perfection, it flashed forth like Indra’slightning against the Coverer on the slopes, the Wolf on the path,the Robber by the streams.

The invariable fixity of Vedic thought when taken in con-junction with its depth, richness and subtlety, gives rise to someinteresting speculations. For we may reasonably argue that sucha fixed form and substance would not easily be possible in thebeginnings of thought and psychological experience or even dur-ing their early progress and unfolding. We may therefore surmisethat our actual Sanhita represents the close of a period, not itscommencement, nor even some of its successive stages. It is evenpossible that its most ancient hymns are a comparatively moderndevelopment or version of a more ancient1 lyric evangel couchedin the freer and more pliable forms of a still earlier humanspeech. Or the whole voluminous mass of its litanies may be onlya selection by Veda Vyasa out of a more richly vocal Aryan past.Made, according to the common belief, by Krishna of the Isle,the great traditional sage, the colossal compiler (Vyasa), withhis face turned towards the commencement of the Iron Age, to-wards the centuries of increasing twilight and final darkness, it isperhaps only the last testament of the Ages of Intuition, the lumi-nous Dawns of the Forefathers, to their descendants, to a humanrace already turning in spirit towards the lower levels and themore easy and secure gains — secure perhaps only in appearance— of the physical life and of the intellect and the logical reason.

But these are only speculations and inferences. Certain it isthat the old tradition of a progressive obscuration and loss ofthe Veda as the law of the human cycle has been fully justified

1 The Veda itself speaks constantly of “ancient” and “modern” Rishis, (purvah. . . .nutanah. ), the former remote enough to be regarded as a kind of demigods, the firstfounders of knowledge.


by the event. The obscuration had already proceeded far be-fore the opening of the next great age of Indian spirituality,the Vedantic, which struggled to preserve or recover what ityet could of the ancient knowledge. It could hardly have beenotherwise. For the system of the Vedic mystics was foundedupon experiences difficult to ordinary mankind and proceededby the aid of faculties which in most of us are rudimentary andimperfectly developed and, when active at all, are mixed andirregular in their operation. Once the first intensity of the searchafter truth had passed, periods of fatigue and relaxation werebound to intervene in which the old truths would be partiallylost. Nor once lost, could they easily be recovered by scrutinisingthe sense of the ancient hymns; for those hymns were couchedin a language that was deliberately ambiguous.

A tongue unintelligible to us may be correctly understoodonce a clue has been found; a diction that is deliberately ambigu-ous, holds its secret much more obstinately and successfully, forit is full of lures and of indications that mislead. Therefore whenthe Indian mind turned again to review the sense of Veda, thetask was difficult and the success only partial. One source of lightstill existed, the traditional knowledge handed down amongthose who memorised and explained the Vedic text or had chargeof the Vedic ritual, — two functions that had originally been one;for in the early days the priest was also the teacher and seer. Butthe clearness of this light was already obscured. Even Purohitsof repute performed the rites with a very imperfect knowledge ofthe power and the sense of the sacred words which they repeated.For the material aspects of Vedic worship had grown like a thickcrust over the inner knowledge and were stifling what they hadonce served to protect. The Veda was already a mass of myth andritual. The power had begun to disappear out of the symbolicceremony; the light had departed from the mystic parable andleft only a surface of apparent grotesqueness and naivete.

The Brahmanas and the Upanishads are the record of apowerful revival which took the sacred text and ritual as astarting-point for a new statement of spiritual thought and ex-perience. This movement had two complementary aspects, one,


the conservation of the forms, another the revelation of the soulof Veda, — the first represented by the Brahmanas,2 the secondby the Upanishads.

The Brahmanas labour to fix and preserve the minutiae ofthe Vedic ceremony, the conditions of their material effectu-ality, the symbolic sense and purpose of their different parts,movements, implements, the significance of texts important inthe ritual, the drift of obscure allusions, the memory of ancientmyths and traditions. Many of their legends are evidently poste-rior to the hymns, invented to explain passages which were nolonger understood; others may have been part of the apparatusof original myth and parable employed by the ancient symbolistsor memories of the actual historical circumstances surroundingthe composition of the hymns. Oral tradition is always a lightthat obscures; a new symbolism working upon an old that ishalf lost, is likely to overgrow rather than reveal it; therefore theBrahmanas, though full of interesting hints, help us very little inour research; nor are they a safe guide to the meaning of separatetexts when they attempt an exact and verbal interpretation.

The Rishis of the Upanishads followed another method.They sought to recover the lost or waning knowledge by medita-tion and spiritual experience and they used the text of the ancientmantras as a prop or an authority for their own intuitions andperceptions; or else the Vedic Word was a seed of thought andvision by which they recovered old truths in new forms. Whatthey found, they expressed in other terms more intelligible to theage in which they lived. In a certain sense their handling of thetexts was not disinterested; it was not governed by the scholar’sscrupulous desire to arrive at the exact intention of the wordsand the precise thought of the sentences in their actual framing.They were seekers of a higher than verbal truth and used wordsmerely as suggestions for the illumination towards which theywere striving. They knew not or they neglected the etymological

2 Necessarily, these and other appreciations in the chapter are brief and summaryviews of certain main tendencies. The Brahmanas for instance have their philosophicalpassages.


sense and employed often a method of symbolic interpretationof component sounds in which it is very difficult to follow them.For this reason, while the Upanishads are invaluable for the lightthey shed on the principal ideas and on the psychological systemof the ancient Rishis, they help us as little as the Brahmanas indetermining the accurate sense of the texts which they quote.Their real work was to found Vedanta rather than to interpretVeda.

For this great movement resulted in a new and more per-manently powerful statement of thought and spirituality, Vedaculminating in Vedanta. And it held in itself two strong tenden-cies which worked towards the disintegration of the old Vedicthought and culture. First, it tended to subordinate more andmore completely the outward ritual, the material utility of themantra and the sacrifice to a more purely spiritual aim andintention. The balance, the synthesis preserved by the old Mys-tics between the external and the internal, the material and thespiritual life was displaced and disorganised. A new balance, anew synthesis was established, leaning finally towards asceticismand renunciation, and maintained itself until it was in its turndisplaced and disorganised by the exaggeration of its own ten-dencies in Buddhism. The sacrifice, the symbolic ritual becamemore and more a useless survival and even an encumbrance; yet,as so often happens, by the very fact of becoming mechanical andineffective the importance of everything that was most externalin them came to be exaggerated and their minutiae irrationallyenforced by that part of the national mind which still clungto them. A sharp practical division came into being, effectivethough never entirely recognised in theory, between Veda andVedanta, a distinction which might be expressed in the formula,“the Veda for the priests, the Vedanta for the sages.”

The second tendency of the Vedantic movement was todisencumber itself progressively of the symbolic language, theveil of concrete myth and poetic figure, in which the Mysticshad shrouded their thought and to substitute a clearer statementand more philosophical language. The complete evolution ofthis tendency rendered obsolete the utility not only of the Vedic


ritual but of the Vedic text. Upanishads, increasingly clear anddirect in their language, became the fountainhead of the highestIndian thought and replaced the inspired verses of Vasishthaand Vishwamitra.3 The Vedas, becoming less and less the in-dispensable basis of education, were no longer studied with thesame zeal and intelligence; their symbolic language, ceasing tobe used, lost the remnant of its inner sense to new generationswhose whole manner of thought was different from that of theVedic forefathers. The Ages of Intuition were passing away intothe first dawn of the Age of Reason.

Buddhism completed the revolution and left of the exter-nalities of the ancient world only some venerable pomps andsome mechanical usages. It sought to abolish the Vedic sacrificeand to bring into use the popular vernacular in place of theliterary tongue. And although the consummation of its workwas delayed for several centuries by the revival of Hinduismin the Puranic religions, the Veda itself benefited little by thisrespite. In order to combat the popularity of the new religion itwas necessary to put forward instead of venerable but unintelli-gible texts Scriptures written in an easy form of a more modernSanskrit. For the mass of the nation the Puranas pushed asidethe Veda and the forms of new religious systems took the placeof the ancient ceremonies. As the Veda had passed from the sageto the priest, so now it began to pass from the hands of the priestinto the hands of the scholar. And in that keeping it suffered thelast mutilation of its sense and the last diminution of its truedignity and sanctity.

Not that the dealings of Indian scholarship with the hymns,beginning from the pre-Christian centuries, have been altogethera record of loss. Rather it is to the scrupulous diligence andconservative tradition of the Pandits that we owe the preserva-tion of Veda at all after its secret had been lost and the hymnsthemselves had ceased in practice to be a living Scripture. And

3 Again this expresses the main tendency and is subject to qualification. The Vedas arealso quoted as authorities; but as a whole it is the Upanishads that become the Book ofKnowledge, the Veda being rather the Book of Works.


even for the recovery of the lost secret the two millenniums ofscholastic orthodoxy have left us some invaluable aids, a textdetermined scrupulously to its very accentuation, the importantlexicon of Yaska and Sayana’s great commentary which in spiteof its many and often startling imperfections remains still forthe scholar an indispensable first step towards the formation ofa sound Vedic learning.

THE SCHOLARS

The text of the Veda which we possess has remained uncorruptedfor over two thousand years. It dates, so far as we know, fromthat great period of Indian intellectual activity, contemporane-ous with the Greek efflorescence, but earlier in its beginnings,which founded the culture and civilisation recorded in the clas-sical literature of the land. We cannot say to how much earliera date our text may be carried. But there are certain consider-ations which justify us in supposing for it an almost enormousantiquity. An accurate text, accurate in every syllable, accuratein every accent, was a matter of supreme importance to the Vedicritualists; for on scrupulous accuracy depended the effectualityof the sacrifice. We are told, for instance, in the Brahmanas thestory of Twashtri who, performing a sacrifice to produce anavenger of his son slain by Indra, produced, owing to an errorof accentuation, not a slayer of Indra, but one of whom Indramust be the slayer. The prodigious accuracy of the ancient Indianmemory is also notorious. And the sanctity of the text preventedsuch interpolations, alterations, modernising revisions as havereplaced by the present form of the Mahabharata the ancientepic of the Kurus. It is not, therefore, at all improbable that wehave the Sanhita of Vyasa substantially as it was arranged bythe great sage and compiler.

Substantially, not in its present written form. Vedic prosodydiffered in many respects from the prosody of classical Sanskritand, especially, employed a greater freedom in the use of thatprinciple of euphonic combination of separate words (sandhi)which is so peculiar a feature of the literary tongue. The Vedic


Rishis, as was natural in a living speech, followed the ear ratherthan fixed rule; sometimes they combined the separate words,sometimes they left them uncombined. But when the Veda cameto be written down, the law of euphonic combination had as-sumed a much more despotic authority over the language and theancient text was written by the grammarians as far as possible inconsonance with its regulations. They were careful, however, toaccompany it with another text, called the Padapatha, in whichall euphonic combinations were again resolved into the origi-nal and separate words and even the components of compoundwords indicated.

It is a notable tribute to the fidelity of the ancient memorisersthat, instead of the confusion to which this system might so easilyhave given rise, it is always perfectly easy to resolve the formaltext into the original harmonies of Vedic prosody. And very feware the instances in which the exactness or the sound judgmentof the Padapatha can be called into question.

We have, then, as our basis a text which we can confidentlyaccept and which, even if we hold it in a few instances doubtfulor defective, does not at any rate call for that often licentiouslabour of emendation to which some of the European classicslend themselves. This is, to start with, a priceless advantage forwhich we cannot be too grateful to the conscientiousness of theold Indian learning.

In certain other directions it might not be safe always tofollow implicitly the scholastic tradition, — as in the ascriptionof the Vedic poems to their respective Rishis, wherever oldertradition was not firm and sound. But these are details of minorimportance. Nor is there, in my view, any good reason to doubtthat we have the hymns arrayed, for the most part, in the rightorder of their verses and in their exact entirety. The exceptions,if they exist, are negligible in number and importance. When thehymns seem to us incoherent, it is because we do not understandthem. Once the clue is found, we discover that they are perfectwholes as admirable in the structure of their thought as in theirlanguage and their rhythms.

It is when we come to the interpretation of the Veda and seek


help from ancient Indian scholarship that we feel compelled tomake the largest reserves. For even in the earlier days of classicalerudition the ritualistic view of the Veda was already dominant,the original sense of the words, the lines, the allusions, the clue tothe structure of the thought had been long lost or obscured; norwas there in the erudite that intuition or that spiritual experiencewhich might have partly recovered the lost secret. In such a fieldmere learning, especially when it is accompanied by an ingeniousscholastic mind, is as often a snare as a guide.

In Yaska’s lexicon, our most important help, we have todistinguish between two elements of very disparate value. WhenYaska gives as a lexicographer the various meanings of Vedicwords, his authority is great and the help he gives is of thefirst importance. It does not appear that he possessed all theancient significances, for many had been obliterated by Timeand Change and in the absence of a scientific Philology couldnot be restored. But much also had been preserved by tradition.Wherever Yaska preserves this tradition and does not use a gram-marian’s ingenuity, the meanings he assigns to words, althoughnot always applicable to the text to which he refers them, can yetbe confirmed as possible senses by a sound Philology. But Yaskathe etymologist does not rank with Yaska the lexicographer.Scientific grammar was first developed by Indian learning, butthe beginnings of sound philology we owe to modern research.Nothing can be more fanciful and lawless than the methodsof mere ingenuity used by the old etymologists down even tothe nineteenth century, whether in Europe or India. And whenYaska follows these methods, we are obliged to part companywith him entirely. Nor in his interpretation of particular texts ishe more convincing than the later erudition of Sayana.

The commentary of Sayana closes the period of originaland living scholastic work on the Veda which Yaska’s Niruktaamong other important authorities may be said to open. Thelexicon was compiled in the earlier vigour of the Indian mindwhen it was assembling its prehistoric gains as the materials ofa fresh outburst of originality; the Commentary is almost thelast great work of the kind left to us by the classical tradition


in its final refuge and centre in Southern India before the oldculture was dislocated and broken into regional fragments bythe shock of the Mahomedan conquest. Since then we have hadjets of strong and original effort, scattered attempts at new birthand novel combination, but work of quite this general, massiveand monumental character has hardly been possible.

The commanding merits of this great legacy of the past areobvious. Composed by Sayana with the aid of the most learnedscholars of his time, it is a work representing an enormous labourof erudition, more perhaps than could have been commandedat that time by a single brain. Yet it bears the stamp of thecoordinating mind. It is consistent in the mass in spite of itsmany inconsistencies of detail, largely planned, yet most simply,composed in a style lucid, terse and possessed of an almost liter-ary grace one would have thought impossible in the traditionalform of the Indian commentary. Nowhere is there any display ofpedantry; the struggle with the difficulties of the text is skilfullyveiled and there is an air of clear acuteness and of assured, yetunassuming authority which imposes even on the dissident. Thefirst Vedic scholars in Europe admired especially the rationalityof Sayana’s interpretations.

Yet, even for the external sense of the Veda, it is not possi-ble to follow either Sayana’s method or his results without thelargest reservation. It is not only that he admits in his methodlicences of language and construction which are unnecessary andsometimes incredible, nor that he arrives at his results, often,by a surprising inconsistency in his interpretation of commonVedic terms and even of fixed Vedic formulae. These are defectsof detail, unavoidable perhaps in the state of the materials withwhich he had to deal. But it is the central defect of Sayana’ssystem that he is obsessed always by the ritualistic formula andseeks continually to force the sense of the Veda into that narrowmould. So he loses many clues of the greatest suggestiveness andimportance for the external sense of the ancient Scripture, — aproblem quite as interesting as its internal sense. The outcome isa representation of the Rishis, their thoughts, their culture, theiraspirations, so narrow and poverty-stricken that, if accepted, it


renders the ancient reverence for the Veda, its sacred authority,its divine reputation quite incomprehensible to the reason oronly explicable as a blind and unquestioning tradition of faithstarting from an original error.

There are indeed other aspects and elements in the com-mentary, but they are subordinate or subservient to the mainidea. Sayana and his helpers had to work upon a great mass ofoften conflicting speculation and tradition which still survivedfrom the past. To some of its elements they had to give a formaladhesion, to others they felt bound to grant minor concessions.It is possible that to Sayana’s skill in evolving out of previousuncertainty or even confusion an interpretation which had firmshape and consistence, is due the great and long-unquestionedauthority of his work.

The first element with which Sayana had to deal, the mostinteresting to us, was the remnant of the old spiritual, philo-sophic or psychological interpretations of the Sruti which werethe true foundation of its sanctity. So far as these had enteredinto the current or orthodox4 conception, Sayana admits them;but they form an exceptional element in his work, insignificantin bulk and in importance. Occasionally he gives a passing men-tion or concession to less current psychological renderings. Hementions, for instance, but not to admit it, an old interpretationof Vritra as the Coverer who holds back from man the objects ofhis desire and his aspirations. For Sayana Vritra is either simplythe enemy or the physical cloud-demon who holds back thewaters and has to be pierced by the Rain-giver.

A second element is the mythological, or, as it might almostbe called, the Puranic, — myths and stories of the gods given intheir outward form without that deeper sense and symbolic factwhich is the justifying truth of all Purana.5

4 I use the word loosely. The terms orthodox and heterodox in the European or sec-tarian sense have no true application to India where opinion has always been free.5 There is reason to suppose that Purana (legend and apologue) and Itihasa (historical

tradition) were parts of Vedic culture long before the present forms of the Puranas andhistorical Epics were evolved.


A third element is the legendary and historic, the storiesof old kings and Rishis, given in the Brahmanas or by latertradition in explanation of the obscure allusions of the Veda.Sayana’s dealings with this element are marked by some hesi-tation. Often he accepts them as the right interpretation of thehymns; sometimes he gives an alternative sense with which hehas evidently more intellectual sympathy, but wavers betweenthe two authorities.

More important is the element of naturalistic interpretation.Not only are there the obvious or the traditional identifications,Indra, the Maruts, the triple Agni, Surya, Usha, but we findthat Mitra was identified with the Day, Varuna with the Night,Aryaman and Bhaga with the Sun, the Ribhus with its rays. Wehave here the seeds of that naturalistic theory of the Veda towhich European learning has given so wide an extension. Theold Indian scholars did not use the same freedom or the samesystematic minuteness in their speculations. Still this element inSayana’s commentary is the true parent of the European Scienceof Comparative Mythology.

But it is the ritualistic conception that pervades; that is thepersistent note in which all others lose themselves. In the for-mula of the philosophic schools, the hymns, even while standingas a supreme authority for knowledge, are yet principally andfundamentally concerned with the Karmakanda, with works,— and by works was understood, preeminently, the ritualisticobservation of the Vedic sacrifices. Sayana labours always inthe light of this idea. Into this mould he moulds the languageof the Veda, turning the mass of its characteristic words intothe ritualistic significances, — food, priest, giver, wealth, praise,prayer, rite, sacrifice.

Wealth and food; — for it is the most egoistic and materi-alistic objects that are proposed as the aim of the sacrifice,possessions, strength, power, children, servants, gold, horses,cows, victory, the slaughter and the plunder of enemies, thedestruction of rival and malevolent critic. As one reads andfinds hymn after hymn interpreted in this sense, one begins tounderstand better the apparent inconsistency in the attitude of


the Gita which, regarding always the Veda as divine knowledge,6

yet censures severely the champions of an exclusive Vedism,7 allwhose flowery teachings were devoted solely to material wealth,power and enjoyment.

It is the final and authoritative binding of the Veda to thislowest of all its possible senses that has been the most unfor-tunate result of Sayana’s commentary. The dominance of theritualistic interpretation had already deprived India of the livinguse of its greatest Scripture and of the true clue to the entire senseof the Upanishads. Sayana’s commentary put a seal of finality onthe old misunderstanding which could not be broken for manycenturies. And its suggestions, when another civilisation discov-ered and set itself to study the Veda, became in the Europeanmind the parent of fresh errors.

Nevertheless, if Sayana’s work has been a key turned withdouble lock on the inner sense of the Veda, it is yet indispensablefor opening the antechambers of Vedic learning. All the vastlabour of European erudition has not been able to replace itsutility. At every step we are obliged to differ from it, but at everystep we are obliged to use it. It is a necessary springing-board,or a stair that we have to use for entrance, though we must leaveit behind if we wish to pass forwards into the penetralia.

6 Gita XV.15.7 Ibid. II.42.

Chapter III

Modern Theories

IT WAS the curiosity of a foreign culture that broke aftermany centuries the seal of final authoritativeness whichSayana had fixed on the ritualistic interpretation of the

Veda. The ancient Scripture was delivered over to a scholarshiplaborious, bold in speculation, ingenious in its flights of fancy,conscientious according to its own lights, but ill-fitted to un-derstand the method of the old mystic poets; for it was void ofany sympathy with that ancient temperament, unprovided withany clue in its own intellectual or spiritual environment to theideas hidden in the Vedic figures and parables. The result hasbeen of a double character, on the one side the beginnings of amore minute, thorough and careful as well as a freer handling ofthe problems of Vedic interpretation, on the other hand a finalexaggeration of its apparent material sense and the completeobscuration of its true and inner secret.

In spite of the hardiness of its speculations and its freedomin discovery or invention the Vedic scholarship of Europe hasreally founded itself throughout on the traditional elementspreserved in Sayana’s commentary and has not attempted anentirely independent handling of the problem. What it foundin Sayana and in the Brahmanas it has developed in the lightof modern theories and modern knowledge; by ingenious de-ductions from the comparative method applied to philology,mythology and history, by large amplifications of the existingdata with the aid of ingenious speculation, by unification ofthe scattered indications available it has built up a completetheory of Vedic mythology, Vedic history, Vedic civilisationwhich fascinates by its detail and thoroughness and concealsby its apparent sureness of method the fact that this imposingedifice has been founded, for the most part, on the sands ofconjecture.

Modern Theories 25

The modern theory of the Veda starts with the conception,for which Sayana is responsible, of the Vedas as the hymnal ofan early, primitive and largely barbaric society crude in its moraland religious conceptions, rude in its social structure and entirelychildlike in its outlook upon the world that environed it. The rit-ualism which Sayana accepted as part of a divine knowledge andas endowed with a mysterious efficacy, European scholarship ac-cepted as an elaboration of the old savage propitiatory sacrificesoffered to imaginary superhuman personalities who might bebenevolent or malevolent according as they were worshipped orneglected. The historical element admitted by Sayana was readilyseized on and enlarged by new renderings and new explanationsof the allusions in the hymns developed in an eager hunt forclues to the primitive history, manners and institutions of thosebarbarous races. The naturalistic element played a still moreimportant role. The obvious identification of the Vedic gods intheir external aspects with certain Nature-Powers was used asthe starting-point for a comparative study of Aryan mytholo-gies; the hesitating identification of certain of the less prominentdeities as Sun-Powers was taken as a general clue to the system ofprimitive myth-making and elaborate sun-myth and star-myththeories of comparative mythology were founded. In this newlight the Vedic hymnology has come to be interpreted as a half-superstitious, half-poetic allegory of Nature with an importantastronomical element. The rest is partly contemporary history,partly the formulae and practices of a sacrificial ritualism, notmystic, but merely primitive and superstitious.

This interpretation is in entire harmony with the scientifictheories of early human culture and of the recent emergence fromthe mere savage which were in vogue throughout the nineteenthcentury and are even now dominant. But the increase of ourknowledge has considerably shaken this first and too hasty gen-eralisation. We now know that remarkable civilisations existedin China, Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria many thousands of years ago,and it is now coming generally to be agreed that Greece and Indiawere no exceptions to the general high culture of Asia and theMediterranean races. If the Vedic Indians do not get the benefit


of this revised knowledge, it is due to the survival of the theorywith which European erudition started, that they belonged to theso-called Aryan race and were on the same level of culture withthe early Aryan Greeks, Celts, Germans as they are representedto us in the Homeric poems, the old Norse Sagas and the Romanaccounts of the ancient Gaul and Teuton. Hence has arisen thetheory that these Aryan races were northern barbarians whobroke in from their colder climes on the old and rich civilisationsof Mediterranean Europe and Dravidian India.

But the indications in the Veda on which this theory of arecent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity anduncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of anysuch invasion. The distinction between Aryan and un-Aryanon which so much has been built, seems on the mass of theevidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference.1

The language of the hymns clearly points to a particular worshipor spiritual culture as the distinguishing sign of the Aryan, — aworship of Light and of the powers of Light and a self-disciplinebased on the culture of the “Truth” and the aspiration to Im-mortality, — Ritam and Amritam. There is no reliable indicationof any racial difference. It is always possible that the bulk of thepeoples now inhabiting India may have been the descendants of anew race from more northern latitudes, even perhaps, as arguedby Mr. Tilak, from the Arctic regions; but there is nothing in theVeda, as there is nothing in the present ethnological features2 ofthe country to prove that this descent took place near to the timeof the Vedic hymns or was the slow penetration of a small bodyof fair-skinned barbarians into a civilised Dravidian peninsula.

1 It is urged that the Dasyus are described as black of skin and noseless in oppositionto the fair and high-nosed Aryans. But the former distinction is certainly applied tothe Aryan Gods and the Dasa Powers in the sense of light and darkness, and the wordanasah. does not mean noseless. Even if it did, it would be wholly inapplicable to theDravidian races; for the southern nose can give as good an account of itself as any“Aryan” proboscis in the North.2 In India we are chiefly familiar with the old philological divisions of the Indian

races and with the speculations of Mr. Risley which are founded upon these earliergeneralisations. But a more advanced ethnology rejects all linguistic tests and leans tothe idea of a single homogeneous race inhabiting the Indian peninsula.

Modern Theories 27

Nor is it a certain conclusion from the data we possess thatthe early Aryan cultures — supposing the Celt, Teuton, Greekand Indian to represent one common cultural origin, — werereally undeveloped and barbarous. A certain pure and highsimplicity in their outward life and its organisation, a certainconcreteness and vivid human familiarity in their conception ofand relations with the gods they worshipped, distinguish theAryan type from the more sumptuous and materialistic Egypto-Chaldean civilisation and its solemn and occult religions. Butthose characteristics are not inconsistent with a high internalculture. On the contrary, indications of a great spiritual traditionmeet us at many points and negate the ordinary theory. The oldCeltic races certainly possessed some of the highest philosophicalconceptions and they preserve stamped upon them even to thepresent day the result of an early mystic and intuitional develop-ment which must have been of long standing and highly evolvedto have produced such enduring results. In Greece it is probablethat the Hellenic type was moulded in the same way by Orphicand Eleusinian influences and that Greek mythology, as it hascome down to us, full of delicate psychological suggestions, is alegacy of the Orphic teaching. It would be only consonant withthe general tradition if it turned out that Indian civilisation hasthroughout been the prolongation of tendencies and ideas sownin us by the Vedic forefathers. The extraordinary vitality of theseearly cultures which still determine for us the principal types ofmodern man, the main elements of his temperament, the chieftendencies of his thought, art and religion, can have proceededfrom no primitive savagery. They are the result of a deep andpuissant prehistoric development.

Comparative Mythology has deformed the sense of man’searly traditions by ignoring this important stage in humanprogress. It has founded its interpretation on a theory which sawnothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads.It has supposed the early religions to have been founded on thewonder of barbarians waking up suddenly to the astonishingfact that such strange things as Dawn and Night and the Sunexisted and attempting in a crude, barbaric, imaginative way to


explain their existence. And from this childlike wonder we strideat one step to the profound theories of the Greek philosophersand the Vedantic sages. Comparative Mythology is the creationof Hellenists interpreting un-Hellenic data from a standpointwhich is itself founded on a misunderstanding of the Greekmind. Its method has been an ingenious play of the poeticimagination rather than a patient scientific research.

If we look at the results of the method, we find an extraor-dinary confusion of images and of their interpretations in whichthere is nowhere any coherence or consistency. It is a mass ofdetails running into each other, getting confusedly into eachother’s way, disagreeing yet entangled, dependent for their va-lidity on the licence of imaginative conjecture as our sole meansof knowledge. This incoherence has even been exalted into astandard of truth; for it is seriously argued by eminent scholarsthat a method arriving at a more logical and well-ordered resultwould be disproved and discredited by its very coherency, sinceconfusion must be supposed to be the very essence of the earlymythopoeic faculty. But in that case there can be nothing bindingin the results of Comparative Mythology and one theory will beas good as another; for there is no reason why one particu-lar mass of incoherence should be held to be more valid thananother mass of incoherence differently composed.

There is much that is useful in the speculations of Com-parative Mythology; but in order that the bulk of its resultsshould be sound and acceptable, it must use a more patient andconsistent method and organise itself as part of a well-foundedScience of Religion. We must recognise that the old religionswere organic systems founded on ideas which were at least ascoherent as those which constitute our modern systems of belief.We must recognise also that there has been a perfectly intelligibleprogressive development from the earlier to the later systems ofreligious creed and of philosophical thought. It is by studyingour data widely and profoundly in this spirit and discoveringthe true evolution of human thought and belief that we shallarrive at real knowledge. The mere identification of Greek andSanskrit names and the ingenious discovery that Heracles’ pyre is

Modern Theories 29

an image of the setting sun or that Paris and Helen are Greek cor-ruptions of the Vedic Sarama and the Panis make an interestingdiversion for an imaginative mind, but can by themselves leadto no serious result, even if they should prove to be correct. Noris their correctness beyond serious doubt, for it is the vice of thefragmentary and imaginative method by which the sun and starmyth interpretations are built up that they can be applied withequal ease and convincingness to any and every human tradition,belief or even actual event of history.3 With this method we cannever be sure where we have hit on a truth or where we arelistening to a mere ingenuity.

Comparative Philology can indeed be called to our aid, but,in the present state of that Science, with very little conclusive-ness. Modern Philology is an immense advance on anything wehave had before the nineteenth century. It has introduced a spiritof order and method in place of mere phantasy; it has given usmore correct ideas of the morphology of language and of whatis or is not possible in etymology. It has established a few ruleswhich govern the phenomena of the detrition of language andguide us in the identification of the same word or of relatedwords as they appear in the changes of different but kindredtongues. Here, however, its achievements cease. The high hopeswhich attended its birth, have not been fulfilled by its maturity.It has failed to create a Science of Language and we are stillcompelled to apply to it the apologetic description given by agreat philologist after some decades of earnest labour when hewas obliged to speak of his favourite pursuits as “our pettyconjectural sciences”. But a conjectural Science is no Scienceat all. Therefore the followers of more exact and scrupulousforms of knowledge refuse that name altogether to ComparativePhilology and deny even the possibility of a linguistic science.

There is, in fact, no real certainty as yet in the obtainedresults of Philology; for beyond one or two laws of a limited

3 E.g. Christ and his twelve apostles are, a great scholar assures us, the sun and thetwelve months. The career of Napoleon is the most perfect Sun-myth in all legend orhistory.


application there is nowhere a sure basis. Yesterday we were allconvinced that Varuna was identical with Ouranos, the Greekheaven; today this identity is denounced to us as a philologi-cal error; tomorrow it may be rehabilitated. Parame vyomanis a Vedic phrase which most of us would translate “in thehighest heaven”, but Mr. T. Paramasiva Aiyar in his brilliantand astonishing work, The Riks, tells us that it means “in thelowest hollow”; for vyoman “means break, fissure, being lit-erally absence of protection, (uma)”; and the reasoning whichhe uses is so entirely after the fashion of the modern scholarthat the philologist is debarred from answering that “absenceof protection” cannot possibly mean a fissure and that humanlanguage was not constructed on these principles. For Philologyhas failed to discover the principles on which language was con-structed or rather was organically developed, and on the otherhand it has preserved a sufficient amount of the old spirit of merephantasy and ingenuity and is full of precisely such brilliances ofhazardous inference. But then we arrive at this result that thereis nothing to help us in deciding whether parame vyoman in theVeda refers to the highest heaven or to the lowest abyss. It isobvious that a philology so imperfect may be a brilliant aid, butcan never be a sure guide to the sense of Veda.

We have to recognise in fact that European scholarship inits dealings with the Veda has derived an excessive prestige fromits association in the popular mind with the march of EuropeanScience. The truth is that there is an enormous gulf between thepatient, scrupulous and exact physical sciences and these otherbrilliant, but immature branches of learning upon which Vedicscholarship relies. Those are careful of their foundation, slowto generalise, solid in their conclusions; these are compelled tobuild upon scanty data large and sweeping theories and supplythe deficiency of sure indications by an excess of conjecture andhypothesis. They are full of brilliant beginnings, but can cometo no secure conclusion. They are the first rough scaffolding fora Science, but they are not as yet Sciences.

It follows that the whole problem of the interpretation ofVeda still remains an open field in which any contribution that

Modern Theories 31

can throw light upon the problem should be welcome. Threesuch contributions have proceeded from Indian scholars. Twoof them follow the lines or the methods of European research,while opening up new theories which if established, would con-siderably alter our view of the external sense of the hymns.Mr. Tilak in his Arctic Home in the Vedas has accepted thegeneral conclusions of European scholarship, but by a freshexamination of the Vedic Dawn, the figure of the Vedic cowsand the astronomical data of the hymns, has established at leasta strong probability that the Aryan races descended originallyfrom the Arctic regions in the glacial period. Mr. T. ParamasivaAiyar by a still bolder departure has attempted to prove thatthe whole of the Rig Veda is a figurative representation of thegeological phenomena belonging to the new birth of our planetafter its long-continued glacial death in the same period of ter-restrial evolution. It is difficult to accept in their mass Mr. Aiyar’sreasonings and conclusions, but he has at least thrown a newlight on the great Vedic mythus of Ahi Vritra and the releaseof the seven rivers. His interpretation is far more consistentand probable than the current theory which is not borne outby the language of the hymns. Taken in conjunction with Mr.Tilak’s work it may serve as the starting-point for a new externalinterpretation of the old Scripture which will explain much thatis now inexplicable and recreate for us the physical origins if notthe actual physical environment of the old Aryan world.

The third Indian contribution is older in date, but nearerto my present purpose. It is the remarkable attempt by SwamiDayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj, to re-establish theVeda as a living religious Scripture. Dayananda took as hisbasis a free use of the old Indian philology which he foundin the Nirukta. Himself a great Sanskrit scholar, he handled hismaterials with remarkable power and independence. Especiallycreative was his use of that peculiar feature of the old Sanskrittongue which is best expressed by a phrase of Sayana’s, — the“multi-significance of roots”. We shall see that the right follow-ing of this clue is of capital importance for understanding thepeculiar method of the Vedic Rishis.


Dayananda’s interpretation of the hymns is governed by theidea that the Vedas are a plenary revelation of religious, ethicaland scientific truth. Its religious teaching is monotheistic and theVedic gods are different descriptive names of the one Deity; theyare at the same time indications of His powers as we see themworking in Nature and by a true understanding of the sense ofthe Vedas we could arrive at all the scientific truths which havebeen discovered by modern research.

Such a theory is, obviously, difficult to establish. The RigVeda itself, indeed, asserts4 that the gods are only different namesand expressions of one universal Being who in His own realitytranscends the universe; but from the language of the hymns weare compelled to perceive in the gods not only different names,but also different forms, powers and personalities of the oneDeva. The monotheism of the Veda includes in itself also themonistic, pantheistic and even polytheistic views of the cosmosand is by no means the trenchant and simple creed of modernTheism. It is only by a violent struggle with the text that we canforce on it a less complex aspect.

That the ancient races were far more advanced in the phys-ical sciences than is as yet recognised, may also be admitted.The Egyptians and Chaldeans, we now know, had discoveredmuch that has since been rediscovered by modern Science andmuch also that has not been rediscovered. The ancient Indianswere, at least, no mean astronomers and were always skilfulphysicians; nor do Hindu medicine and chemistry seem to havebeen of a foreign origin. It is possible that in other branches alsoof physical knowledge they were advanced even in early times.But the absolute completeness of scientific revelation asserted bySwami Dayananda will take a great deal of proving.

The hypothesis on which I shall conduct my own enquiryis that the Veda has a double aspect and that the two, thoughclosely related, must be kept apart. The Rishis arranged thesubstance of their thought in a system of parallelism by whichthe same deities were at once internal and external Powers of

4 R.V. I.164.46 and 170.1.

Modern Theories 33

universal Nature, and they managed its expression through asystem of double values by which the same language served fortheir worship in both aspects. But the psychological sense pre-dominates and is more pervading, close-knit and coherent thanthe physical. The Veda is primarily intended to serve for spiritualenlightenment and self-culture. It is, therefore, this sense whichhas first to be restored.

To this task each of the ancient and modern systems ofinterpretation brings an indispensable assistance. Sayana andYaska supply the ritualistic framework of outward symbolsand their large store of traditional significances and explana-tions. The Upanishads give their clue to the psychological andphilosophical ideas of the earlier Rishis and hand down to ustheir method of spiritual experience and intuition. Europeanscholarship supplies a critical method of comparative research,yet to be perfected, but capable of immensely increasing thematerials available and sure eventually to give a scientific cer-tainty and firm intellectual basis which has hitherto been lacking.Dayananda has given the clue to the linguistic secret of the Rishisand reemphasised one central idea of the Vedic religion, the ideaof the One Being with the Devas expressing in numerous namesand forms the many-sidedness of His unity.

With so much help from the intermediate past we may yetsucceed in reconstituting this remoter antiquity and enter by thegate of the Veda into the thoughts and realities of a prehistoricwisdom.

Chapter IV

The Foundations of thePsychological Theory

AHYPOTHESIS of the sense of Veda must always proceed,to be sure and sound, from a basis that clearly emergesin the language of the Veda itself. Even if the bulk of

its substance be an arrangement of symbols and figures, thesense of which has to be discovered, yet there should be clearindications in the explicit language of the hymns which willguide us to that sense. Otherwise, the symbols being themselvesambiguous, we shall be in danger of manufacturing a system outof our own imaginations and preferences instead of discoveringthe real purport of the figures chosen by the Rishis. In that case,however ingenious and complete our theory, it is likely to be abuilding in the air, brilliant, but without reality or solidity.

Our first duty, therefore, is to determine whether there is,apart from figure and symbol, in the clear language of the hymnsa sufficient kernel of psychological notions to justify us in sup-posing at all a higher than the barbarous and primitive sense ofthe Veda. And afterwards we have to find, as far as possible fromthe internal evidence of the Suktas themselves, the interpretationof each symbol and image and the right psychological functionof each of the gods. A firm and not a fluctuating sense, foundedon good philological justification and fitting naturally into thecontext wherever it occurs, must be found for each of the fixedterms of the Veda. For, as has already been said, the language ofthe hymns is a language fixed and invariable; it is the carefullypreserved and scrupulously respected diction consistently ex-pressing either a formal creed and ritual or a traditional doctrineand constant experience. If the language of the Vedic Rishis werefree and variable, if their ideas were evidently in a state of flux,shifting and uncertain, a convenient licence and incoherence in

The Foundations of the Psychological Theory 35

the sense we attach to their terminology and the relation wefind between their ideas, might be justified or tolerated. But thehymns themselves on the very face of them bear exactly the con-trary testimony. We have the right therefore to demand the samefidelity and scrupulousness in the interpreter as in the originalhe interprets. There is obviously a constant relation betweenthe different notions and cherished terms of the Vedic religion;incoherence and uncertainty in the interpretation will prove, notthat the face evidence of the Veda is misleading, but simply thatthe interpreter has failed to discover the right relations.

If, after this initial labour has been scrupulously and care-fully done, it can be shown by a translation of the hymns thatthe interpretations we had fixed fit in naturally and easily inwhatever context, if they are found to illuminate what seemedobscure and to create intelligible and clear coherence where thereseemed to be only confusion; if the hymns in their entirety givethus a clear and connected sense and the successive verses show alogical succession of related thoughts, and if the result as a wholebe a profound, consistent and antique body of doctrines, thenour hypothesis will have a right to stand besides others, to chal-lenge them where they contradict it or to complete them wherethey are consistent with its findings. Nor will the probability ofour hypothesis be lessened, but rather its validity confirmed if itbe found that the body of ideas and doctrines thus revealed in theVeda are a more antique form of subsequent Indian thought andreligious experience, the natural parent of Vedanta and Purana.

So considerable and minute a labour is beyond the scopeof these brief and summary chapters. Their object is only toindicate for those who care to follow the clue I have myselfreceived, the path and its principal turnings, — the results I havearrived at and the main indications by which the Veda itselfhelps us to arrive at them. And, first, it seems to me advisableto explain the genesis of the theory in my own mind so thatthe reader may the better understand the line I have taken or,if he chooses, check any prepossessions or personal preferenceswhich may have influenced or limited the right application ofreasoning to this difficult problem.


Like the majority of educated Indians I had passively ac-cepted without examination, before myself reading the Veda,the conclusions of European Scholarship both as to the reli-gious and as to the historical and ethnical sense of the ancienthymns. In consequence, following again the ordinary line takenby modernised Hindu opinion, I regarded the Upanishads asthe most ancient source of Indian thought and religion, the trueVeda, the first Book of Knowledge. The Rig Veda in the moderntranslations which were all I knew of this profound Scripture,represented for me an important document of our national his-tory, but seemed of small value or importance for the history ofthought or for a living spiritual experience.

My first contact with Vedic thought came indirectly whilepursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of IndianYoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously con-verging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths fol-lowed by our forefathers. At this time there began to arise inmy mind an arrangement of symbolic names attached to certainpsychological experiences which had begun to regularise them-selves; and among them there came the figures of three femaleenergies, Ila, Saraswati, Sarama, representing severally three outof the four faculties of the intuitive reason, — revelation, inspi-ration and intuition. Two of these names were not well known tome as names of Vedic goddesses, but were connected rather withthe current Hindu religion or with old Puranic legend, Saraswati,goddess of learning and Ila, mother of the Lunar dynasty. ButSarama was familiar enough. I was unable, however, to establishany connection between the figure that rose in my mind and theVedic hound of heaven, who was associated in my memory withthe Argive Helen and represented only an image of the physicalDawn entering in its pursuit of the vanished herds of Light intothe cave of the Powers of darkness. When once the clue is found,the clue of the physical Light imaging the subjective, it is easy tosee that the hound of heaven may be the intuition entering intothe dark caverns of the subconscious mind to prepare the de-livery and out-flashing of the bright illuminations of knowledgewhich have there been imprisoned. But the clue was wanting


and I was obliged to suppose an identity of name without anyidentity of the symbol.

It was my stay in Southern India which first seriously turnedmy thoughts to the Veda. Two observations that were forced onmy mind, gave a serious shock to my second-hand belief in theracial division between Northern Aryans and Southern Dravid-ians. The distinction had always rested for me on a supposeddifference between the physical types of Aryan and Dravidianand a more definite incompatibility between the northern San-skritic and the southern non-Sanskritic tongues. I knew indeed ofthe later theories which suppose that a single homogeneous race,Dravidian or Indo-Afghan, inhabits the Indian peninsula; buthitherto I had not attached much importance to these specula-tions. I could not, however, be long in Southern India without be-ing impressed by the general recurrence of northern or “Aryan”types in the Tamil race. Wherever I turned, I seemed to recognisewith a startling distinctness, not only among the Brahmins butin all castes and classes, the old familiar faces, features, figuresof my friends of Maharashtra, Gujerat, Hindustan, even, thoughthis similarity was less widely spread, of my own province Ben-gal. The impression I received was as if an army of all the tribesof the North had descended on the South and submerged anyprevious populations that may have occupied it. A general im-pression of a Southern type survived, but it was impossible to fixit rigidly while studying the physiognomy of individuals. And inthe end I could not but perceive that whatever admixtures mighthave taken place, whatever regional differences might have beenevolved, there remains, behind all variations, a unity of physicalas well as of cultural type1 throughout India. For the rest, thisis a conclusion to which ethnological speculation2 itself has anincreasing tendency.

1 I prefer not to use the term race, for race is a thing much more obscure and difficult todetermine than is usually imagined. In dealing with it the trenchant distinctions currentin the popular mind are wholly out of place.2 Always supposing that ethnological speculations have at all any validity. The only

firm basis of ethnology is the theory of the hereditary invariability of the human skullwhich is now being challenged. If it disappears, the whole science disappears with it.


But what then of the sharp distinction between Aryan andDravidian races created by the philologists? It disappears. If atall an Aryan invasion is admitted, we have either to supposethat it flooded India and determined the physical type of thepeople, with whatever modifications, or that it was the incursionof small bands of a less civilised race who melted away into theoriginal population. We have then to suppose that entering a vastpeninsula occupied by a civilised people, builders of great cities,extensive traders, not without mental and spiritual culture, theywere yet able to impose on them their own language, religion,ideas and manners. Such a miracle would be just possible if theinvaders possessed a very highly organised language, a greaterforce of creative mind and a more dynamic religious form andspirit.

And there was always the difference of language to supportthe theory of a meeting of races. But here also my preconceivedideas were disturbed and confounded. For on examining thevocables of the Tamil language, in appearance so foreign to theSanskritic form and character, I yet found myself continuallyguided by words or by families of words supposed to be pureTamil in establishing new relations between Sanskrit and itsdistant sister, Latin, and occasionally, between the Greek andthe Sanskrit. Sometimes the Tamil vocable not only suggestedthe connection, but proved the missing link in a family of con-nected words. And it was through this Dravidian language thatI came first to perceive what seems to me now the true law,origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues. Iwas unable to pursue my examination far enough to establishany definite conclusion, but it certainly seems to me that theoriginal connection between the Dravidian and Aryan tongueswas far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed andthe possibility suggests itself that they may even have been twodivergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue. If so,the sole remaining evidence of an Aryan invasion of DravidianIndia would be the indications to be found in the Vedic hymns.

It was, therefore, with a double interest that for the firsttime I took up the Veda in the original, though without any


immediate intention of a close or serious study. It did not takelong to see that the Vedic indications of a racial division be-tween Aryans and Dasyus and the identification of the latterwith the indigenous Indians were of a far flimsier character thanI had supposed. But far more interesting to me was the discoveryof a considerable body of profound psychological thought andexperience lying neglected in these ancient hymns. And the im-portance of this element increased in my eyes when I found, first,that the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exactlight psychological experiences of my own for which I had foundno sufficient explanation either in European psychology or in theteachings of Yoga or of Vedanta, so far as I was acquainted withthem, and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passagesand ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attachno exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense tomuch in the Puranas.

I was helped in arriving at this result by my fortunate ig-norance of the commentary of Sayana. For I was left free toattribute their natural psychological significance to many ordi-nary and current words of the Veda, such as dhı, thought orunderstanding, manas, mind, mati, thought, feeling or mentalstate, manıs.a, intellect, r.tam, truth; to give their exact shadesof sense to kavi, seer, manıs.ı, thinker, vipra, vipascit, enlight-ened in mind, and a number of similar words; and to hazard apsychological sense, justified by more extensive study, for wordslike daks.a which for Sayana means strength and sravas which herenders as wealth, food or fame. The psychological theory of theVeda rests upon our right to concede their natural significanceto these vocables.

Sayana gives to the words dhı, r.tam, etc., very variablesignificances. R. tam, which is almost the key-word of any psycho-logical or spiritual interpretation, is rendered by him sometimesas “truth”, more often “sacrifice”, occasionally in the sense ofwater. The psychological interpretation gives it invariably thesense of Truth. Dhı is rendered by Sayana variously “thought”,“prayer”, “action”, “food”, etc. The psychological interpreta-tion gives it consistently the sense of thought or understanding.


And so with the other fixed terms of Veda. Moreover, Sayana’stendency, is to obliterate all fine shades and distinctions betweenwords and to give them their vaguest general significance. Allepithets conveying ideas of mental activity mean for him simply“intelligent”, all words suggesting various ideas of force, andthe Veda overflows with them, are reduced to the broad idea ofstrength. I found myself on the contrary impressed by the greatimportance of fixing and preserving the right shade of meaningand precise association to be given to different words, howeverclose they may be to each other in their general sense. I donot see indeed why we should suppose that the Vedic Rishis,unlike all other masters of poetic style, used words pell-melland indiscriminately without feeling their just associations andgiving them their right and exact force in the verbal combination.

By following this principle I found that without departingfrom the simple natural and straightforward sense of words andclauses an extraordinarily large body not only of separate versesbut of entire passages came at once into evidence which entirelyaltered the whole character of the Veda. For this Scripture thenappeared to have a constant vein of the richest gold of thoughtand spiritual experience running all through it and appearingsometimes in small streaks, sometimes in larger bands, in themajority of its hymns. Moreover, besides the words that in theirplain and ordinary sense give at once a wealth of psychologicalsignificance to their context, the Veda is full of others to whichit is possible to give either an external and material or an inter-nal and psychological value according to our conception of thegeneral purport of Veda. For instance such words as raye, rayi,radhas, ratna, may mean either merely material prosperity andriches or internal felicity and plenitude applying itself equally tothe subjective and the objective world; dhana, vaja, pos.a maymean either objective wealth, plenty and increase or all posses-sions internal or external, their plenitude and their growth in thelife of the individual. Raye is used in the Upanishads, in a quo-tation from the Rig Veda, to mean spiritual felicity; why shouldit be incapable of bearing that sense in the original text? Vajaoccurs frequently in a context in which every other word has


a psychological significance and the mention of physical plentycomes in with a violent jar of incoherency into the homogeneoustotality of the thought. Commonsense, therefore, demands thatthe use of these words with a psychological import should beadmitted in the Veda.

But if this is done consistently, not only whole verses andpassages, but whole hymns assume at once the psychologicalcomplexion. On one condition this transformation is frequentlycomplete, leaving no word or phrase unaffected, — the condi-tion that we should admit the symbolic character of the Vedicsacrifice. We find in the Gita the word yajna, sacrifice, used in asymbolic sense for all action, whether internal or external, thatis consecrated to the gods or to the Supreme. Was such symbolicuse of the word born of a later philosophical intellectuality, orwas it inherent in the Vedic idea of sacrifice? I found that in theVeda itself there were hymns in which the idea of the yajna orof the victim is openly symbolical, others in which the veil isquite transparent. The question then arose whether these werelater compositions developing an incipient symbolism out of oldsuperstitious practices or rather the occasional plainer statementof a sense which is in most hymns more or less carefully veiled bythe figure. If there were no constant recurrence of psychologicalpassages in the Veda, the former explanation would, no doubt,have to be accepted. But on the contrary whole hymns tooknaturally a psychological sense proceeding with a perfect andluminous coherency from verse to verse, where the only pointsof obscurity were the mention of the sacrifice or of the offering orsometimes of the officiating priest, who might be either a man ora god. If these words could be interpreted symbolically, I foundalways that the progression of thought became more perfect,more luminous, more coherent and the sense of the hymn inits entirety was victoriously completed. I felt therefore justifiedby every canon of sound criticism in pursuing my hypothesisfarther and including in it the symbolic sense of the Vedic ritual.

Nevertheless here intervenes the first real difficulty of thepsychological interpretation. Hitherto I had been proceeding bya perfectly straightforward and natural method of interpretation


based on the surface meaning of the words and sentences. Now Icame to an element in which the surface meaning had, in a sense,to be overridden, and this is a process in which every critical andconscientious mind must find itself beset by continual scruples.Nor can one always be sure, even with the utmost care, of havinghit on the right clue and the just interpretation.

The Vedic sacrifice consists of three features, — omitting forthe moment the god and the mantra, — the persons who offer,the offering and the fruits of the offering. If the yajna is the actionconsecrated to the gods, I could not but take the yajamana, thegiver of the sacrifice, as the doer of the action. Yajna is works,internal or external, the yajamana must be the soul or the person-ality as the doer. But there were also the officiating priests, hota,r.tvij, purohita, brahma, adhvaryu etc. What was their part inthe symbolism? For if we once suppose a symbolic sense for thesacrifice, we must suppose also a symbolic value for each featureof the ceremony. I found that the gods were continually spokenof as priests of the offering and in many passages it was undis-guisedly a non-human power or energy which presided over thesacrifice. I perceived also that throughout Veda the elementsof our personality are themselves continually personified. I hadonly to apply this rule inversely and to suppose that the personof the priest in the external figure represented in the internalactivities figured a non-human power or energy or an elementof our personality. It remained to fix the psychological sense ofthe different priestly offices. Here I found that the Veda itselfpresented a clue by its philological indications and insistences,such as the use of the word purohita in its separated form withthe sense of the representative “put in front” and a frequentreference to the god Agni who symbolises the divine Will orForce in humanity that takes up the action in all consecration ofworks.

The offerings were more difficult to understand. Even ifthe Soma-wine by the context in which it occurred, its use andeffect and the philological indication of its synonyms, suggestedits own interpretation, what could possibly be indicated by the“ghritam”, the clarified butter in the sacrifice? And yet the word


as used in the Veda was constantly insisting on its own symbol-ical significance. What for instance could be made of clarifiedbutter dropping from heaven or dripping from the horses ofIndra or dripping from the mind? Obviously, this was grotesquenonsense, if the sense of ghr.ta as clarified butter was anythingmore than a symbol used with great looseness, so that often theexternal sense was wholly or partly put aside in the mind of thethinker. It was possible of course to vary conveniently the senseof the words, to take ghr.ta sometimes as butter and sometimes aswater and manas sometimes as the mind, sometimes as food ora cake. But I found that ghr.ta was constantly used in connectionwith the thought or the mind, that heaven in Veda was a symbolof the mind, that Indra represented the illuminated mentality andhis two horses double energies of that mentality and even that theVeda sometimes speaks plainly of offering the intellect (manıs.a)as purified ghr.ta to the gods, ghr.tam na putam manıs.am.3 Theword ghr.ta counts also among its philological significances thesense of a rich or warm brightness. It was by this concurrence ofindications that I felt justified in fixing a certain psychologicalsignificance for the figure of the clarified butter. And I found thesame rule and the same method applicable to other features ofthe sacrifice.

The fruits of the offering were in appearance purely material— cows, horses, gold, offspring, men, physical strength, victoryin battle. Here the difficulty thickened. But I had already foundthat the Vedic cow was an exceedingly enigmatical animal andcame from no earthly herd. The word go means both cow andlight and in a number of passages evidently meant light evenwhile putting forward the image of the cow. This is clear enoughwhen we have to do with the cows of the sun — the Homerickine of Helios — and the cows of the Dawn. Psychologically,the physical Light might well be used as a symbol of knowledgeand especially of the divine knowledge. But how could this merepossibility be tested and established? I found that passages oc-curred in which all the surrounding context was psychological

3 See Rig Veda I.110.6 and III.2.1. — Ed.


and only the image of the cow interfered with its obtrusivematerial suggestion. Indra is invoked as the maker of perfectforms to drink the wine of Soma; drinking he becomes full ofecstasy and a “giver of cows”; then we can attain to his mostintimate or his most ultimate right thinkings, then we questionhim and his clear discernment brings us our highest good. It isobvious that in such a passage these cows cannot be materialherds nor would the giving of physical Light carry any sense inthe context. In one instance at least the psychological symbolismof the Vedic cow was established with certainty to my mind. Ithen applied it to other passages in which the word occurred andalways I saw that it resulted in the best sense and the greatestpossible coherency in the context.

The cow and horse, go and asva, are constantly associated.Usha, the Dawn, is described as gomatı asvavatı; Dawn givesto the sacrificer horses and cows. As applied to the physicaldawn gomatı means accompanied by or bringing the rays oflight and is an image of the dawn of illumination in the humanmind. Therefore asvavatı also cannot refer merely to the physicalsteed; it must have a psychological significance as well. A studyof the Vedic horse led me to the conclusion that go and asvarepresent the two companion ideas of Light and Energy, Con-sciousness and Force, which to the Vedic and Vedantic mindwere the double or twin aspect of all the activities of existence.

It was apparent, therefore, that the two chief fruits of theVedic sacrifice, wealth of cows and wealth of horses, were sym-bolic of richness of mental illumination and abundance of vitalenergy. It followed that the other fruits continually associatedwith these two chief results of the Vedic karma must also becapable of a psychological significance. It remained only to fixtheir exact purport.

Another all-important feature of Vedic symbolism is thesystem of the worlds and the functions of the gods. I found theclue to the symbolism of the worlds in the Vedic conception ofthe vyahr.tis, the three symbolic words of the mantra, “OM BhurBhuvah Swah”, and in the connection of the fourth Vyahriti,Mahas, with the psychological term “Ritam”. The Rishis speak


of three cosmic divisions, Earth, the Antariksha or middle re-gion and Heaven (Dyaus); but there is also a greater Heaven(Brihad Dyau) called also the Wide World, the Vast (Brihat),and typified sometimes as the Great Water, Maho Arnas. This“Brihat” is again described as “Ritam Brihat” or in a triple term“Satyam Ritam Brihat”. And as the three worlds correspondto the Vyahritis, so this fourth world of the Vastness and theTruth seems to correspond to the fourth Vyahriti mentioned inthe Upanishads, Mahas. In the Puranic formula the four arecompleted by three others, Jana, Tapas and Satya, the threesupreme worlds of the Hindu cosmology. In the Veda also wehave three supreme worlds whose names are not given. Butin the Vedantic and Puranic system the seven worlds corre-spond to seven psychological principles or forms of existence,Sat, Chit, Ananda, Vijnana, Manas, Prana and Anna. Now Vi-jnana, the central principle, the principle of Mahas, the greatworld, is the Truth of things, identical with the Vedic Ritamwhich is the principle of Brihat, the Vast, and while in thePuranic system Mahas is followed in the ascending order byJana, the world of Ananda, of the divine Bliss, in the Vedaalso Ritam, the Truth, leads upward to Mayas, Bliss. We may,therefore, be fairly sure that the two systems are identical andthat both depend on the same idea of seven principles of sub-jective consciousness formulating themselves in seven objec-tive worlds. On this principle I was able to identify the Vedicworlds with the corresponding psychological planes of con-sciousness and the whole Vedic system became clear to mymind.

With so much established the rest followed naturally andinevitably. I had already seen that the central idea of the VedicRishis was the transition of the human soul from a state of deathto a state of immortality by the exchange of the Falsehood for theTruth, of divided and limited being for integrality and infinity.Death is the mortal state of Matter with Mind and Life involvedin it; Immortality is a state of infinite being, consciousness andbliss. Man rises beyond the two firmaments, Rodasi, Heavenand Earth, mind and body, to the infinity of the Truth, Mahas,


and so to the divine Bliss. This is the “great passage” discoveredby the Ancestors, the ancient Rishis.

The gods I found to be described as children of Light, sonsof Aditi, of Infinity; and without exception they are described asincreasing man, bringing him light, pouring on him the fullnessof the waters, the abundance of the heavens, increasing the truthin him, building up the divine worlds, leading him against allattacks to the great goal, the integral felicity, the perfect bliss.Their separate functions emerged by means of their activities,their epithets, the psychological sense of the legends connectedwith them, the indications of the Upanishads and Puranas, theoccasional side-lights from Greek myth. On the other handthe demons who opposed them, are all powers of division andlimitation, Coverers, Tearers, Devourers, Confiners, Dualisers,Obstructers, as their names indicate, powers that work againstthe free and unified integrality of the being. These Vritras, Panis,Atris, Rakshasas, Sambara, Vala, Namuchi, are not Dravidiankings and gods, as the modern mind with its exaggerated historicsense would like them to be; they represent a more antique ideabetter suited to the religious and ethical preoccupations of ourforefathers. They represent the struggle between the powers ofthe higher Good and the lower desire, and this conception of theRig Veda and the same opposition of good and evil otherwiseexpressed, with less psychological subtlety, with more ethicaldirectness in the scriptures of the Zoroastrians, our ancientneighbours and kindred, proceeded probably from a commonoriginal discipline of the Aryan culture.

Finally, I found that the systematic symbolism of the Vedawas extended to the legends related of the gods and of their deal-ings with the ancient seers. Some of these myths, if not all, mayhave had, in all probability had, a naturalistic and astronomicalorigin; but, if so, their original sense had been supplemented by apsychological symbolism. Once the sense of the Vedic symbols isknown, the spiritual intention of these legends becomes apparentand inevitable. Every element of the Veda is inextricably boundup with every other and the very nature of these compositionscompels us, once we have adopted a principle of interpretation,


to carry it to its farthest rational limits. Their materials have beenskilfully welded together by firm hands and any inconsistencyin our handling of them shatters the whole fabric of their senseand their coherent thinking.

Thus there emerged in my mind, revealing itself as it wereout of the ancient verses, a Veda which was throughout theScripture of a great and antique religion already equipped witha profound psychological discipline, — a Scripture not confusedin thought or primitive in its substance, not a medley of het-erogeneous or barbarous elements, but one, complete and self-conscious in its purpose and in its purport, veiled indeed by thecover, sometimes thick, sometimes transparent, of another andmaterial sense, but never losing sight even for a single momentof its high spiritual aim and tendency.

Chapter V

The Philological Method of the Veda

NO INTERPRETATION of the Veda can be sound whichdoes not rest on a sound and secure philological basis;and yet this scripture with its obscure and antique

tongue of which it is the sole remaining document offers uniquephilological difficulties. To rely entirely on the traditional andoften imaginative renderings of the Indian scholars is impossiblefor any critical mind. Modern philology strives after a moresecure and scientific basis, but has not yet found it.

In the psychological interpretation of the Veda there are,especially, two difficulties which can only be met by a satisfac-tory philological justification. This interpretation necessitatesthe acceptance of several new senses for a fair number of fixedtechnical terms of the Veda, — terms, for example like uti, avas,vayas. These new renderings satisfy one test we may fairly de-mand; they fit into every context, clarify the sense and free usfrom the necessity of attributing quite different significances tothe same term in a work of so fixed a form as the Veda. Butthis test is not sufficient. We must have, besides, a philologicalbasis which will not only account for the new sense, but alsoexplain how a single word came to be capable of so many dif-ferent meanings, the sense attached to it by the psychologicalinterpretation, those given to it by the old grammarians andthose, if any, which are attached to it in later Sanskrit. But this isnot easily possible unless we find a more scientific basis for ourphilological deductions than our present knowledge affords.

Secondly, the theory of the psychological interpretation de-pends very often on the use of a double meaning for importantwords, — the key-words of the secret teaching. The figure is onethat is traditional in Sanskrit literature and sometimes employedwith an excess of artifice in the later classical works; it is the sles.aor rhetorical figure of double entendre. But its very artificiality

The Philological Method of the Veda 49

predisposes us to believe that this poetical device must belongnecessarily to a later and more sophisticated culture. How are weto account for its constant presence in a work of the remotestantiquity? Moreover, there is a peculiar extension of it in theVedic use, a deliberate employment of the “multi-significance”of Sanskrit roots in order to pack as much meaning as possibleinto a single word, which at first sight enhances the difficultyof the problem to an extraordinary degree. For instance, theword, asva, usually signifying a horse, is used as a figure ofthe Prana, the nervous energy, the vital breath, the half-mental,half-material dynamism which links mind and matter. Its rootis capable, among other senses, of the ideas of impulsion, force,possession, enjoyment, and we find all these meanings united inthis figure of the Steed of Life to indicate the essential tenden-cies of the Pranic energy. Such a use of language would not bepossible if the tongue of the Aryan forefathers obeyed the sameconventions as our modern speech or were in the same stageof development. But if we can suppose that there was somepeculiarity in the old Aryan tongue as it was used by the VedicRishis by which words were felt to be more alive, less merelyconventional symbols of ideas, more free in their transitionsof meaning than in our later use of speech, then we shall findthat these devices were not at all artificial or far-fetched to theiremployers, but were rather the first natural means which wouldsuggest themselves to men anxious at once to find new, brief andadequate formulae of speech for psychological conceptions notunderstood by the vulgar and to conceal the ideas contained intheir formulae from a profane intelligence. I believe that this isthe true explanation; it can be established, I think, by a study ofthe development of Aryan speech that language did pass througha stage peculiarly favourable to this cryptic and psychologicaluse of words which in their popular handling have a plain,precise and physical significance.

I have already indicated that my first study of Tamil wordshad brought me to what seemed a clue to the very origins andstructure of the ancient Sanskrit tongue; and so far did this cluelead that I lost sight entirely of my original subject of interest, the


connections between Aryan and Dravidian speech, and plungedinto the far more interesting research of the origins and laws ofdevelopment of human language itself. It seems to me that thisgreat inquiry and not the ordinary preoccupations of linguisticscholars should be the first and central aim of any true scienceof Philology.

Owing to the failure of the first hopes which attended thebirth of modern Philology, its meagre results, its crystallisationinto the character of a “petty conjectural science”, the idea of aScience of Language is now discredited and its very possibility,on quite insufficient reasoning, entirely denied. It seems to meimpossible to acquiesce in such a final negation. If there is onething that Modern Science has triumphantly established, it isthe reign of law and process of evolution in the history of allearthly things. Whatever may be the deeper nature of Speech, inits outward manifestation as human language it is an organism,a growth, a terrestrial evolution. It contains indeed a constantpsychological element and is therefore more free, flexible, con-sciously self-adaptive than purely physical organisms; its secretis more difficult to seize, its constituents yield themselves onlyto more subtle and less trenchant methods of analysis. But lawand process exist in mental no less than in material phenomenain spite of their more volatile and variable appearances. Lawand process must have governed the origins and developmentsof language. Given the necessary clue and sufficient data, theymust be discoverable. It seems to me that in the Sanskrit languagethe clue can be found, the data lie ready for investigation.

The error of Philology which prevented it from arriving at amore satisfactory result in this direction, was its preoccupationin the physical parts of speech with the exterior morphology oflanguage and in its psychological parts with the equally externalconnections of formed vocables and of grammatical inflexions inkindred languages. But the true method of Science is to go backto the origins, the embryology, the elements and more obscureprocesses of things. From the obvious only the obvious andsuperficial results. The profundities of things, their real truth,can best be discovered by penetration into the hidden things that


the surface of phenomena conceals, into that past developmentof which the finished forms present only secret and dispersedindications or into the possibilities from which the actualitieswe see are only a narrow selection. A similar method appliedto the earlier forms of human speech can alone give us a realScience of Language.

It is not in a short chapter of a treatise itself brief anddevoted to another subject that it is at all possible to present theresults of the work that I have attempted on these lines.1 I canonly briefly indicate the one or two features which bear directlyon the subject of Vedic interpretation. And I mention them heresolely to avoid any supposition in the minds of my readers that indeparting from the received senses of certain Vedic words I havesimply taken advantage of that freedom of ingenious conjecturewhich is at once one of the great attractions and one of the mostserious weaknesses of modern Philology.

My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, likeanimals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths, — livinggrowths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Outof these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive root-words with an immense progeny which have their successivegenerations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families,selective groups each having a common stock and a commonpsychological history. For the factor which presided over the de-velopment of language was the association, by the nervous mindof primitive man, of certain general significances or rather ofcertain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds.The process of this association was also in no sense artificial butnatural, governed by simple and definite psychological laws.

In their beginnings language-sounds were not used to ex-press what we should call ideas; they were rather the vocalequivalents of certain general sensations and emotion-values. Itwas the nerves and not the intellect which created speech. To

1 I propose to deal with them in a separate work on “The Origins of Aryan Speech”.[See Vedic Studies with Writings on Philology, volume 14 of THE COMPLETE WORKSOF SRI AUROBINDO.]


use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu, not Indra, were the originalartificers of human language. Mind has emerged out of vitaland sensational activities; intellect in man has built itself upon abasis of sense-associations and sense-reactions. By a similar pro-cess the intellectual use of language has developed by a naturallaw out of the sensational and emotional. Words, which wereoriginally vital ejections full of a vague sense-potentiality, haveevolved into fixed symbols of precise intellectual significances.

In consequence, the word originally was not fixed to anyprecise idea. It had a general character or quality (gun. a), whichwas capable of a great number of applications and therefore ofa great number of possible significances. And this gun.a and itsresults it shared with many kindred sounds. At first, therefore,word-clans, word-families started life on the communal systemwith a common stock of possible and realised significances anda common right to all of them; their individuality lay rather inshades of expression of the same ideas than in any exclusive rightto the expression of a single idea. The early history of languagewas a development from this communal life of words to a systemof individual property in one or more intellectual significances.The principle of partition was at first fluid, then increased inrigidity, until word-families and finally single words were ableto start life on their own account. The last stage of the entirelynatural growth of language comes when the life of the wordis entirely subjected to the life of the idea which it represents.For in the first state of language the word is as living or evena more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. Inits last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomesall-important, the sound secondary.

Another feature of the early history of language is that itexpresses at first a remarkably small stock of ideas and these arethe most general notions possible and generally the most con-crete, such as light, motion, touch, substance, extension, force,speed, etc. Afterwards there is a gradual increase in variety ofidea and precision of idea. The progression is from the generalto the particular, from the vague to the precise, from the phys-ical to the mental, from the concrete to the abstract, from the


expression of an abundant variety of sensations about similarthings to the expression of precise difference between similarthings, feelings and actions. This progression is worked out byprocesses of association in ideas which are always the same, al-ways recurrent and, although no doubt due to the environmentsand actual experiences of the men who spoke the language, wearthe appearance of fixed natural laws of development. And afterall what is a law but a process which has been worked outby the nature of things in response to the necessities of theirenvironment and has become the fixed habit of their action?

From this past history of language certain consequencesderive which are of considerable importance in Vedic inter-pretation. In the first place by a knowledge of the laws underwhich the relations of sound and sense formed themselves in theSanskrit tongue and by a careful and minute study of its word-families it is possible to a great extent to restore the past historyof individual words. It is possible to account for the meaningsactually possessed by them, to show how they were worked outthrough the various stages of language-development, to establishthe mutual relations of different significances and to explain howthey came to be attached to the same word in spite of the widedifference and sometimes even the direct contrariety of theirsense-values. It is possible also to restore lost senses of words ona sure and scientific basis and to justify them by an appeal to theobserved laws of association which governed the developmentof the old Aryan tongues, to the secret evidence of the word itselfand to the corroborative evidence of its immediate kindred. Thusinstead of having a purely floating and conjectural basis for ourdealings with the vocables of the Vedic language, we can workwith confidence upon a solid and reliable foundation.

Naturally, it does not follow that because a Vedic wordmay or must have had at one time a particular significance,that significance can be safely applied to the actual text of theVeda. But we do establish a sound sense and a clear possibilityof its being the right sense for the Veda. The rest is a matter ofcomparative study of the passages in which the word occurs andof constant fitness in the context. I have continually found that


a sense thus restored illumines always the context wherever it isapplied and on the other hand that a sense demanded always bythe context is precisely that to which we are led by the historyof the word. This is a sufficient basis for a moral, if not for anabsolute certainty.

Secondly, one remarkable feature of language in its inceptionis the enormous number of different meanings of which a singleword was capable and also the enormous number of wordswhich could be used to represent a single idea. Afterwards thistropical luxuriance came to be cut down. The intellect intervenedwith its growing need of precision, its growing sense of economy.The bearing capacity of words progressively diminished; and itbecame less and less tolerable to be burdened with a superfluousnumber of words for the same idea, a redundant variety ofideas for the same word. A considerable, though not too rigideconomy in these respects, modified by a demand for a temperaterichness of variation, became the final law of language. But theSanskrit tongue never quite reached the final stages of this devel-opment; it dissolved too early into the Prakrit dialects. Even inits latest and most literary form it is lavish of varieties of mean-ings for the same word; it overflows with a redundant wealthof synonyms. Hence its extraordinary capacity for rhetoricaldevices which in any other language would be difficult, forcedand hopelessly artificial, and especially for the figure of doublesense, of sles.a.

The Vedic Sanskrit represents a still earlier stratum in thedevelopment of language. Even in its outward features it is lessfixed than any classical tongue; it abounds in a variety of formsand inflexions; it is fluid and vague, yet richly subtle in its useof cases and tenses. And on its psychological side it has notyet crystallised, is not entirely hardened into the rigid formsof intellectual precision. The word for the Vedic Rishi is stilla living thing, a thing of power, creative, formative. It is notyet a conventional symbol for an idea, but itself the parent andformer of ideas. It carries within it the memory of its roots, isstill conscient of its own history.

The Rishis’ use of language was governed by this ancient


psychology of the Word. When in English we use the word“wolf” or “cow”, we mean by it simply the animal designated;we are not conscious of any reason why we should use thatparticular sound for the idea except the immemorial custom ofthe language; and we cannot use it for any other sense or purposeexcept by an artificial device of style. But for the Vedic Rishi“vrika” meant the tearer and therefore, among other applica-tions of the sense, a wolf; “dhenu” meant the fosterer, nourisher,and therefore a cow. But the original and general sense predom-inates, the derived and particular is secondary. Therefore, it waspossible for the fashioner of the hymn to use these commonwords with a great pliability, sometimes putting forward theimage of the wolf or the cow, sometimes using it to colour themore general sense, sometimes keeping it merely as a conven-tional figure for the psychological conception on which his mindwas dwelling, sometimes losing sight of the image altogether. Itis in the light of this psychology of the old language that wehave to understand the peculiar figures of Vedic symbolism ashandled by the Rishis, even to the most apparently common andconcrete. It is so that words like “ghritam”, the clarified butter,“soma”, the sacred wine, and a host of others are used.

Moreover, the partitions made by the thought between dif-ferent senses of the same word were much less separative thanin modern speech. In English “fleet” meaning a number of shipsand “fleet” meaning swift are two different words; when we use“fleet” in the first sense we do not think of the swiftness of theship’s motion, nor when we use it in the second, do we recallthe image of ships gliding rapidly over the ocean. But this wasprecisely what was apt to occur in the Vedic use of language.“Bhaga”, enjoyment, and “bhaga”, share, were for the Vedicmind not different words, but one word which had developedtwo different uses. Therefore it was easy for the Rishis to employit in one of the two senses with the other at the back of the mindcolouring its overt connotation or even to use it equally in bothsenses at a time by a sort of figure of cumulative significance.“Chanas” meant food but also it meant “enjoyment, pleasure”;therefore it could be used by the Rishi to suggest to the profane


mind only the food given at the sacrifice to the gods, but for theinitiated it meant the Ananda, the joy of the divine bliss enteringinto the physical consciousness and at the same time suggestedthe image of the Soma-wine, at once the food of the gods andthe Vedic symbol of the Ananda.

We see everywhere this use of language dominating theWord of the Vedic hymns. It was the great device by whichthe ancient Mystics overcame the difficulty of their task. Agnifor the ordinary worshipper may have meant simply the god ofthe Vedic fire, or it may have meant the principle of Heat andLight in physical Nature, or to the most ignorant it may havemeant simply a superhuman personage, one of the many “giversof wealth”, satisfiers of human desire. How suggest to thosecapable of a deeper conception the psychological functions ofthe God? The word itself fulfilled that service. For Agni meantthe Strong, it meant the Bright, or even Force, Brilliance. Soit could easily recall to the initiated, wherever it occurred, theidea of the illumined Energy which builds up the worlds andwhich exalts man to the Highest, the doer of the great work, thePurohit of the human sacrifice.

Or how keep it in the mind of the hearer that all thesegods are personalities of the one universal Deva? The names ofthe gods in their very meaning recall that they are only epithets,significant names, descriptions, not personal appellations. Mitrais the Deva as the Lord of love and harmony, Bhaga as theLord of enjoyment, Surya as the Lord of illumination, Varunaas the all-pervading Vastness and purity of the Divine supportingand perfecting the world. “The Existent is One,” says the RishiDirghatamas, “but the sages express It variously; they say Indra,Varuna, Mitra, Agni; they call It Agni, Yama, Matarishwan.”The initiate in the earlier days of the Vedic knowledge had noneed of this express statement. The names of the gods carried tohim their own significance and recalled the great fundamentaltruth which remained with him always.

But in the later ages the very device used by the Rishisturned against the preservation of the knowledge. For languagechanged its character, rejected its earlier pliability, shed off old


familiar senses; the word contracted and shrank into its outerand concrete significance. The ambrosial wine of the Anandawas forgotten in the physical offering; the image of the clarifiedbutter recalled only the gross libation to mythological deities,lords of the fire and the cloud and the storm-blast, godheadsvoid of any but a material energy and an external lustre. Theletter lived on when the spirit was forgotten; the symbol, thebody of the doctrine, remained, but the soul of knowledge hadfled from its coverings.

Chapter VI

Agni and the Truth

THE RIG VEDA is one in all its parts. Whichever of itsten Mandalas we choose, we find the same substance,the same ideas, the same images, the same phrases. The

Rishis are the seers of a single truth and use in its expression acommon language. They differ in temperament and personality;some are inclined to a more rich, subtle and profound use ofVedic symbolism; others give voice to their spiritual experiencein a barer and simpler diction, with less fertility of thought,richness of poetical image or depth and fullness of suggestion.Often the songs of one seer vary in their manner, range fromthe utmost simplicity to the most curious richness. Or there arerisings and fallings in the same hymn; it proceeds from the mostordinary conventions of the general symbol of sacrifice to amovement of packed and complex thought. Some of the Suktasare plain and almost modern in their language; others baffleus at first by their semblance of antique obscurity. But thesedifferences of manner take nothing from the unity of spiritualexperience, nor are they complicated by any variation of thefixed terms and the common formulae. In the deep and mysticstyle of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity ofMedhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vish-wamitra as in Vasishtha’s even harmonies we have the same firmfoundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence tothe sacred conventions of the Initiates.

From this peculiarity of the Vedic compositions it resultsthat the method of interpretation which I have described canbe equally well illustrated from a number of scattered Suktasselected from the ten Mandalas or from any small block ofhymns by a single Rishi. If my purpose were to establish beyondall possibility of objection the interpretation which I am nowoffering, a much more detailed and considerable work would

Agni and the Truth 59

be necessary. A critical scrutiny covering the whole of the tenMandalas would be indispensable. To justify for instance theidea I attach to the Vedic term Ritam, the Truth, or my ex-planation of the symbol of the Cow of Light, I should haveto cite all passages of any importance in which the idea of theTruth or the image of the Cow are introduced and establishmy thesis by an examination of their sense and context. Orif I wish to prove that Indra in the Veda is really in his psy-chological functions the master of luminous mind typified byDyaus, or Heaven, with its three shining realms, Rochana, Ishould have to examine similarly the hymns addressed to Indraand the passages in which there is a clear mention of the Vedicsystem of worlds. Nor could this be sufficient, so intertwinedand interdependent are the notions of the Veda, without somescrutiny of the other Gods and of other important psychologicalterms connected with the idea of the Truth and of the mentalillumination through which man arrives at it. I recognise thenecessity of such a work of justification and hope to follow itout in other studies on the Vedic Truth, on the Gods of theVeda and on Vedic symbols. But a labour of this scope would bebeyond the range of the present work, which is confined merelyto an illustration of my method and to a brief statement of theresults of my theory.

In order to illustrate the method I propose to take the firsteleven Suktas of the first Mandala and to show how some ofthe central ideas of a psychological interpretation arise out ofcertain important passages or single hymns and how the sur-rounding context of the passages and the general thought of thehymns assume an entirely new appearance in the light of thisprofounder thinking.

The Sanhita of the Rig Veda, as we possess it, is arrangedin ten books or Mandalas. A double principle is observed inthe arrangement. Six of the Mandalas are given each to thehymns of a single Rishi or family of Rishis. Thus the second isdevoted chiefly to the Suktas of the Rishi Gritsamada, the thirdand the seventh similarly to the great names of Vishwamitraand Vasishtha respectively, the fourth to Vamadeva, the sixth to


Bharadwaja. The fifth is occupied by the hymns of the house ofAtri. In each of these Mandalas the Suktas addressed to Agniare first collected together and followed by those of which Indrais the deity; the invocations of other gods, Brihaspati, Surya,the Ribhus, Usha etc. close the Mandala. A whole book, theninth, is given to a single god, Soma. The first, eighth and tenthMandalas are collections of Suktas by various Rishis, but thehymns of each seer are ordinarily placed together in the orderof their deities, Agni leading, Indra following, the other godssucceeding. Thus the first Mandala opens with ten hymns of theseer Madhuchchhandas, son of Vishwamitra, and an eleventhascribed to Jetri, son of Madhuchchhandas. This last Sukta,however, is identical in style, manner and spirit with the ten thatprecede it and they can all be taken together as a single block ofhymns one in intention and diction.

A certain principle of thought-development also has notbeen absent from the arrangement of these Vedic hymns. Theopening Mandala seems to have been so designed that the gen-eral thought of the Veda in its various elements should graduallyunroll itself under the cover of the established symbols by thevoices of a certain number of Rishis who almost all rank high asthinkers and sacred singers and are, some of them, among themost famous names of Vedic tradition. Nor can it be by accidentthat the tenth or closing Mandala gives us, with an even greatermiscellaneity of authors, the last developments of the thought ofthe Veda and some of the most modern in language of its Suktas.It is here that we find the Sacrifice of the Purusha and the greatHymn of the Creation. It is here also that modern scholars thinkthey discover the first origins of the Vedantic philosophy, theBrahmavada.

In any case, the hymns of the son and grandson of Vishwa-mitra with which the Rig Veda opens strike admirably the firstessential notes of the Vedic harmony. The first hymn, addressedto Agni, suggests the central conception of the Truth which isconfirmed in the second and third Suktas invoking Indra in com-pany with other gods. In the remaining eight hymns with Indraas the sole deity, except for one which he shares with the Maruts,


we find the symbols of the Soma and the Cow, the obstructorVritra and the great role played by Indra in leading man tothe Light and overthrowing the barriers to his progress. Thesehymns are therefore of crucial importance to the psychologicalinterpretation of the Veda.

There are four verses in the Hymn to Agni, the fifth to theeighth, in which the psychological sense comes out with a greatforce and clearness, escaping from the veil of the symbol.

Agnir hota kavikratuh. , satyas citrasravastamah. ;devo devebhir a gamat.

Yad anga dasus.e tvam, agne bhadram karis.yasi;tavet tat satyam angirah. .

Upa tvagne dive dive, dos.avastar dhiya vayam;namo bharanta emasi.

Rajantam adhvaran. am, gopam r.tasya dıdivim;vardhamanam sve dame.

In this passage we have a series of terms plainly bearingor obviously capable of a psychological sense and giving theircolour to the whole context. Sayana, however, insists on a purelyritual interpretation and it is interesting to see how he arrives atit. In the first phrase we have the word kavi meaning a seer and,even if we take kratu to mean work of the sacrifice, we shallhave as a result, “Agni, the priest whose work or rite is that ofthe seer”, a turn which at once gives a symbolic character to thesacrifice and is in itself sufficient to serve as the seed of a deeperunderstanding of the Veda. Sayana feels that he has to turn thedifficulty at any cost and therefore he gets rid of the sense of seerfor kavi and gives it another and unusual significance. He thenexplains that Agni is satya, true, because he brings about thetrue fruit of the sacrifice. Sravas Sayana renders “fame”, Agnihas an exceedingly various renown. It would have been surelybetter to take the word in the sense of wealth so as to avoid theincoherency of this last rendering. We shall then have this resultfor the fifth verse, “Agni the priest, active in the ritual, who istrue (in its fruit) — for his is the most varied wealth, — let himcome, a god with the gods.”


To the sixth Rik the commentator gives a very awkward andabrupt construction and trivial turn of thought which breaksentirely the flow of the verse. “That good (in the shape of variedwealth) which thou shalt effect for the giver, thine is that. This istrue, O Angiras,” that is to say, there can be no doubt about thisfact, for if Agni does good to the giver by providing him withwealth, he in turn will perform fresh sacrifices to Agni, and thusthe good of the sacrificer becomes the good of the god. Hereagain it would be better to render, “The good that thou wilt dofor the giver, that is that truth of thee, O Angiras,” for we thusget at once a simpler sense and construction and an explanationof the epithet, satya, true, as applied to the god of the sacrificialfire. This is the truth of Agni that to the giver of the sacrifice hesurely gives good in return.

The seventh verse offers no difficulty to the ritualistic in-terpretation except the curious phrase, “we come bearing theprostration.” Sayana explains that bearing here means simplydoing and he renders, “To thee day by day we, by night and byday, come with the thought performing the prostration.” In theeighth verse he takes r.tasya in the sense of truth and explainsit as the true fruit of the ritual. “To thee shining, the protectorof the sacrifices, manifesting always their truth (that is, theirinevitable fruit), increasing in thy own house.” Again, it wouldbe simpler and better to take r.tam in the sense of sacrifice andto render, “To thee shining out in the sacrifices, protector of therite, ever luminous, increasing in thy own house.” The “ownhouse” of Agni, says the commentator, is the place of sacrificeand this is indeed called frequently enough in Sanskrit, “thehouse of Agni”.

We see, therefore, that with a little managing we can workout a purely ritual sense quite empty of thought even for apassage which at first sight offers a considerable wealth of psy-chological significance. Nevertheless, however ingeniously it iseffected, flaws and cracks remain which betray the artificialityof the work. We have had to throw overboard the plain senseof kavi which adheres to it throughout the Veda and foist inan unreal rendering. We have either to divorce the two words


satya and r.ta which are closely associated in the Veda or togive a forced sense to r.ta. And throughout we have avoided thenatural suggestions pressed on us by the language of the Rishi.

Let us now follow instead the opposite principle and givetheir full psychological value to the words of the inspired text.Kratu means in Sanskrit work or action and especially work inthe sense of the sacrifice; but it means also power or strength(the Greek kratos) effective of action. Psychologically this powereffective of action is the will. The word may also mean mind orintellect and Sayana admits thought or knowledge as a possiblesense for kratu. Sravas means literally hearing and from thisprimary significance is derived its secondary sense, “fame”. But,psychologically, the idea of hearing leads up in Sanskrit to an-other sense which we find in sravan.a, sruti, sruta, — revealedknowledge, the knowledge which comes by inspiration. Dr.s.t.iand sruti, sight and hearing, revelation and inspiration are thetwo chief powers of that supra-mental faculty which belongsto the old Vedic idea of the Truth, the Ritam. The word sravasis not recognised by the lexicographers in this sense, but it isaccepted in the sense of a hymn, — the inspired word of theVeda. This indicates clearly that at one time it conveyed theidea of inspiration or of something inspired, whether word orknowledge. This significance, then, we are entitled to give it,provisionally at least, in the present passage; for the other senseof fame is entirely incoherent and meaningless in the context.Again the word namas is also capable of a psychological sense;for it means literally “bending down” and is applied to theact of adoring submission to the deity rendered physically bythe prostration of the body. When therefore the Rishi speaksof “bearing obeisance to Agni by the thought” we can hardlydoubt that he gives to namas the psychological sense of theinward prostration, the act of submission or surrender to thedeity.

We get then this rendering of the four verses: —“May Agni, priest of the offering whose will towards action

is that of the seer, who is true, most rich in varied inspiration,come, a god with the gods.


“The good that thou wilt create for the giver, that is thattruth of thee, O Angiras.

“To thee day by day, O Agni, in the night and in the lightwe by the thought come bearing our submission, —

“To thee who shinest out from the sacrifices (or, who gov-ernest the sacrifices), guardian of the Truth and its illumination,increasing in thy own home.”

The defect of the translation is that we have had to employone and the same word for satyam and r.tam whereas, as we seein the formula satyam r.tam br.hat, there was a distinction in theVedic mind between the precise significances of the two words.

Who, then, is this god Agni to whom language of so mystica fervour is addressed, to whom functions so vast and profoundare ascribed? Who is this guardian of the Truth, who is in hisact its illumination, whose will in the act is the will of a seerpossessed of a divine wisdom governing his richly varied in-spiration? What is the Truth that he guards? And what is thisgood that he creates for the giver who comes always to him inthought day and night bearing as his sacrifice submission andself-surrender? Is it gold and horses and cattle that he brings oris it some diviner riches?

It is not the sacrificial Fire that is capable of these functions,nor can it be any material flame or principle of physical heatand light. Yet throughout the symbol of the sacrificial Fire ismaintained. It is evident that we are in the presence of a mysticsymbolism to which the fire, the sacrifice, the priest are onlyoutward figures of a deeper teaching and yet figures which itwas thought necessary to maintain and to hold constantly infront.

In the early Vedantic teaching of the Upanishads we comeacross a conception of the Truth which is often expressed byformulas taken from the hymns of the Veda, such as the expres-sion already quoted, satyam r.tam br.hat, — the truth, the right,the vast. This Truth is spoken of in the Veda as a path leadingto felicity, leading to immortality. In the Upanishads also it isby the path of the Truth that the sage or seer, Rishi or Kavi,passes beyond. He passes out of the falsehood, out of the mortal


state into an immortal existence. We have the right therefore toassume that the same conception is in question in both Veda andVedanta.

This psychological conception is that of a truth which istruth of divine essence, not truth of mortal sensation and appear-ance. It is satyam, truth of being; it is in its action r.tam, right, —truth of divine being regulating right activity both of mind andbody; it is br.hat, the universal truth proceeding direct and unde-formed out of the Infinite. The consciousness that correspondsto it is also infinite, br.hat, large as opposed to the consciousnessof the sense-mind which is founded upon limitation. The oneis described as bhuma, the large, the other as alpa, the little.Another name for this supramental or truth consciousness isMahas which also means the great, the vast. And as for thefacts of sensation and appearance which are full of falsehoods(anr.tam, not-truth or wrong application of the satyam in men-tal and bodily activity), we have for instruments the senses,the sense-mind (manas) and the intellect working upon theirevidence, so for the truth-consciousness there are correspondingfaculties, — dr.s.t.i, sruti, viveka, the direct vision of the truth, thedirect hearing of its word, the direct discrimination of the right.Whoever is in possession of this truth-consciousness or open tothe action of these faculties, is the Rishi or Kavi, sage or seer. Itis these conceptions of the truth, satyam and r.tam, that we haveto apply in this opening hymn of the Veda.

Agni in the Veda is always presented in the double aspectof force and light. He is the divine power that builds up theworlds, a power which acts always with a perfect knowledge,for it is jatavedas, knower of all births, visvani vayunani vidvan,— it knows all manifestations or phenomena or it possesses allforms and activities of the divine wisdom. Moreover it is repeat-edly said that the gods have established Agni as the immortalin mortals, the divine power in man, the energy of fulfilmentthrough which they do their work in him. It is this work whichis symbolised by the sacrifice.

Psychologically, then, we may take Agni to be the divinewill perfectly inspired by divine Wisdom, and indeed one with it,


which is the active or effective power of the Truth-consciousness.This is the obvious sense of the word kavikratuh. , he whose activewill or power of effectivity is that of the seer, — works, that is tosay, with the knowledge which comes by the truth-consciousnessand in which there is no misapplication or error. The epithetsthat follow confirm this interpretation. Agni is satya, true inhis being; perfect possession of his own truth and the essentialtruth of things gives him the power to apply it perfectly in allact and movement of force. He has both the satyam and ther.tam. Moreover, he is citrasravastamah. ; from the Ritam thereproceeds a fullness of richly luminous and varied inspirationswhich give the capacity for doing the perfect work. For all theseare epithets of Agni as the hotr., the priest of the sacrifice, hewho performs the offering. Therefore it is the power of Agnito apply the Truth in the work (karma or apas) symbolised bythe sacrifice, that makes him the object of human invocation.The importance of the sacrificial fire in the outward ritual cor-responds to the importance of this inward force of unified Lightand Power in the inward rite by which there is communicationand interchange between the mortal and the Immortal. Agni iselsewhere frequently described as the envoy, duta, the mediumof that communication and interchange.

We see, then, in what capacity Agni is called to the sacrifice.“Let him come, a god with the gods.” The emphasis given tothe idea of divinity by this repetition, devo devebhir, becomesintelligible when we recall the standing description of Agni asthe god in human beings, the immortal in mortals, the divineguest. We may give the full psychological sense by translating,“Let him come, a divine power with the divine powers.” For inthe external sense of the Veda the Gods are universal powersof physical Nature personified; in any inner sense they mustbe universal powers of Nature in her subjective activities, Will,Mind, etc. But in the Veda there is always a distinction be-tween the ordinary human or mental action of these puissances,manus.vat, and the divine. It is supposed that man by the rightuse of their mental action in the inner sacrifice to the gods canconvert them into their true or divine nature, the mortal can


become immortal. Thus the Ribhus, who were at first humanbeings or represented human faculties, became divine and im-mortal powers by perfection in the work, sukr.tyaya, svapasyaya.It is a continual self-offering of the human to the divine and acontinual descent of the divine into the human which seems tobe symbolised in the sacrifice.

The state of immortality thus attained is conceived as astate of felicity or bliss founded on a perfect Truth and Right,satyam r.tam. We must, I think, understand in this sense theverse that follows. “The good (happiness) which thou wilt cre-ate for the giver, that is that truth of thee, O Agni.” In otherwords, the essence of this truth, which is the nature of Agni,is the freedom from evil, the state of perfect good and hap-piness which the Ritam carries in itself and which is sure tobe created in the mortal when he offers the sacrifice by theaction of Agni as the divine priest. Bhadram means anythinggood, auspicious, happy and by itself need not carry any deepsignificance. But we find it in the Veda used, like r.tam, in aspecial sense. It is described in one of the hymns (V.82) asthe opposite of the evil dream (duh. s.vapnyam), the false con-sciousness of that which is not the Ritam, and of duritam, falsegoing, which means all evil and suffering. Bhadram is there-fore equivalent to suvitam, right going, which means all goodand felicity belonging to the state of the Truth, the Ritam. Itis Mayas, the felicity, and the gods who represent the Truth-consciousness are described as mayobhuvah. , those who bringor carry in their being the felicity. Thus every part of the Veda,if properly understood, throws light upon every other part. Itis only when we are misled by its veils that we find in it anincoherence.

In the next verse there seems to be stated the condition ofthe effective sacrifice. It is the continual resort day by day, inthe night and in the light, of the thought in the human beingwith submission, adoration, self-surrender, to the divine Willand Wisdom represented by Agni. Night and Day, Naktos.asa,are also symbolical, like all the other gods in the Veda, and thesense seems to be that in all states of consciousness, whether


illumined or obscure, there must be a constant submission andreference of all activities to the divine control.

For whether by day or night Agni shines out in the sacrifices;he is the guardian of the Truth, of the Ritam in man and defendsit from the powers of darkness; he is its constant illuminationburning up even in obscure and besieged states of the mind. Theideas thus briefly indicated in the eighth verse are constantlyfound throughout the hymns to Agni in the Rig Veda.

Agni is finally described as increasing in his own home. Wecan no longer be satisfied with the explanation of the own homeof Agni as the “fire-room” of the Vedic householder. We mustseek in the Veda itself for another interpretation and we find itin the 75th hymn of the first Mandala.

Yaja no mitravarun. a, yaja devan r.tam br.hat;agne yaks.i svam damam.

“Sacrifice for us to Mitra and Varuna, sacrifice to the gods,to the Truth, the Vast; O Agni, sacrifice to thy own home.”

Here r.tam br.hat and svam damam seem to express thegoal of the sacrifice and this is perfectly in consonance withthe imagery of the Veda which frequently describes the sacrificeas travelling towards the gods and man himself as a travellermoving towards the truth, the light or the felicity. It is evident,therefore, that the Truth, the Vast and Agni’s own home areidentical. Agni and other gods are frequently spoken of as beingborn in the truth, dwelling in the wide or vast. The sense, then,will be in our passage that Agni the divine will and power in manincreases in the truth-consciousness, its proper sphere, wherefalse limitations are broken down, urav anibadhe, in the wideand the limitless.

Thus in these four verses of the opening hymn of the Vedawe get the first indications of the principal ideas of the VedicRishis, — the conception of a Truth-consciousness supramentaland divine, the invocation of the gods as powers of the Truthto raise man out of the falsehoods of the mortal mind, the at-tainment in and by this Truth of an immortal state of perfectgood and felicity and the inner sacrifice and offering of what


one has and is by the mortal to the Immortal as the means ofthe divine consummation. All the rest of Vedic thought in itsspiritual aspects is grouped around these central conceptions.

Chapter VII

Varuna-Mitra and the Truth

IF THE idea of the Truth that we have found in the veryopening hymn of the Veda really carries in itself the con-tents we have supposed and amounts to the conception of a

supramental consciousness which is the condition of the state ofimmortality or beatitude and if this be the leading conception ofthe Vedic Rishis, we are bound to find it recurring throughoutthe hymns as a centre for other and dependent psychologicalrealisations. In the very next Sukta, the second hymn of Madhu-chchhandas addressed to Indra and Vayu, we find another pas-sage full of clear and this time quite invincible psychologicalsuggestions in which the idea of the Ritam is insisted upon withan even greater force than in the hymn to Agni. The passagecomprises the last three Riks of the Sukta.

Mitram huve putadaks.am, varun. am ca risadasam;dhiyam ghr.tacım sadhanta.

R. tena mitravarun. av, r.tavr.dhav r.taspr.sa;kratum br.hantam asathe.

Kavı no mitravarun. a, tuvijata uruks.aya;daks.am dadhate apasam.

In the first Rik of this passage we have the word daks.ausually explained by Sayana as strength, but capable of a psycho-logical significance, the important word ghr.ta in the adjectivalform ghr.tacı and the remarkable phrase dhiyam ghr.tacım. Theverse may be translated literally “I invoke Mitra of purifiedstrength (or, purified discernment) and Varuna destroyer of ourfoes perfecting (or accomplishing) a bright understanding.”

In the second Rik we have Ritam thrice repeated and thewords br.hat and kratu, to both of which we have attached a con-siderable importance in the psychological interpretation of theVeda. Kratu here may mean either work of sacrifice or effective

Varuna-Mitra and the Truth 71

power. In favour of the former sense we have a similar passagein the Veda in which Varuna and Mitra are said to attain to orenjoy by the Truth a mighty sacrifice, yajnam br.hantam asathe.But this parallel is not conclusive; for while in one expressionit is the sacrifice itself that is spoken of, in the other it maybe the power or strength which effects the sacrifice. The versemay be translated, literally, “By Truth Mitra and Varuna, truth-increasing, truth-touching, enjoy (or, attain) a mighty work” or“a vast (effective) power.”

Finally in the third Rik we have again daks.a; we have theword kavi, seer, already associated by Madhuchchhandas withkratu, work or will; we have the idea of the Truth, and wehave the expression uruks.aya, where uru, wide or vast, may bean equivalent for br.hat, the vast, which is used to describe theworld or plane of the truth-consciousness, the “own home” ofAgni. I translate the verse, literally, “For us Mitra and Varuna,seers, multiply-born, wide-housed, uphold the strength (or, dis-cernment) that does the work.”

It will at once be evident that we have in this passage ofthe second hymn precisely the same order of ideas and manyof the same expressions as those on which we founded our-selves in the first Sukta. But the application is different andthe conceptions of the purified discernment, the richly-brightunderstanding, dhiyam ghr.tacım, and the action of the Truth inthe work of the sacrifice, apas, introduce certain fresh precisionswhich throw further light on the central ideas of the Rishis.

The word daks.a, which alone in this passage admits of somereal doubt as to its sense, is usually rendered by Sayana strength.It comes from a root which, like most of its congeners, e.g. das,dis, dah, suggested originally as one of its characteristic signif-icances an aggressive pressure and hence any form of injury,but especially dividing, cutting, crushing or sometimes burning.Many of the words for strength had originally this idea of aforce for injury, the aggressive strength of the fighter and slayer,the kind of force most highly prized by primitive man makinga place for himself by violence on the earth he had come toinherit. We see this connection in the ordinary Sanskrit word for


strength, balam, which is of the same family as the Greek ballo,I strike, and belos, a weapon. The sense, strength, for daks.a hasthe same origin.

But this idea of division led up also in the psychology oflanguage-development to quite another order of ideas, for whenman wished to have words for mental conceptions, his readiestmethod was to apply the figures of physical action to the mentalmovement. The idea of physical division or separation was thusused and converted into that of distinction. It seems to havebeen first applied to distinguishing by the ocular sense and thento the act of mental separation, — discernment, judgment. Thusthe root vid, which means in Sanskrit to find or know, signifiesin Greek and Latin to see. Dr.s, to see, meant originally to rend,tear apart, separate; pas, to see, has a similar origin. We havethree almost identical roots which are very instructive in thisrespect, — pis, to hurt, injure, be strong; pis., to hurt, injure,be strong, crush, pound; and pis, to form, shape, organise, bereduced to the constituent parts, — all these senses betrayingthe original idea of separation, division, cutting apart, — withderivatives, pisaca, a devil, and pisuna, which means on oneside harsh, cruel, wicked, treacherous, slanderous, all from theidea of injury, and at the same time “indicatory, manifesting,displaying, making clear” from the other sense of distinction.So kr., to injure, divide, scatter appears in Greek krino, I sift,choose, judge, determine. Daks.a has a similar history. It is kinto the root das which in Latin gives us doceo, I teach and inGreek dokeo, I think, judge, reckon, and dokazo, I observe,am of opinion. So also we have the kindred root dis meaningto point out or teach, Greek deiknumi. Almost identical withdaks.a itself is the Greek doxa, opinion, judgment, and dexios,clever, dexterous, right-hand. In Sanskrit the root daks. meansto hurt, kill and also to be competent, able, the adjective daks.ameans clever, skilful, competent, fit, careful, attentive; daks.in. ameans clever, skilful, right-hand, like dexios, and the noun daks.ameans, besides strength and also wickedness from the senseof hurting, mental ability or fitness like other words of thefamily. We may compare also the word dasa in the sense of


mind, understanding. All this evidence taken together seems toindicate clearly enough that daks.a must have meant at one timediscernment, judgment, discriminative thought-power and thatits sense of mental capacity is derived from this sense of mentaldivision and not by transference of the idea of physical strengthto power of mind.

We have therefore three possible senses for daks.a in theVeda, strength generally, mental power or especially the powerof judgment, discernment. Daks.a is continually associated withkratu; the Rishis aspire to them together, daks.aya kratve, whichmay mean simply, “capacity and effective power” or “willand discernment”. Continually we find the word occurring inpassages where the whole context relates to mental activities.Finally, we have the goddess Dakshina who may well be afemale form of Daksha, himself a god and afterwards in thePurana one of the Prajapatis, the original progenitors, — wehave Dakshina associated with the manifestation of knowledgeand sometimes almost identified with Usha, the divine Dawn,who is the bringer of illumination. I shall suggest that Dakshinalike the more famous Ila, Saraswati and Sarama, is one of fourgoddesses representing the four faculties of the Ritam or Truth-consciousness, — Ila representing truth-vision or revelation,Saraswati truth-audition, inspiration, the divine word, Saramaintuition, Dakshina the separative intuitional discrimination.Daksha then will mean this discrimination whether as mentaljudgment on the mind-plane or as intuitional discernment onthe plane of the Ritam.

The three riks with which we are dealing occur as the closingpassage of a hymn of which the first three verses are addressedto Vayu alone and the next three to Indra and Vayu. Indra inthe psychological interpretation of the hymns represents, as weshall see, Mind-Power. The word for the sense-faculties, indriya,is derived from his name. His special realm is Swar, a wordwhich means sun or luminous, being akin to sura and surya, thesun, and is used to indicate the third of the Vedic vyahr.tis andthe third of the Vedic worlds corresponding to the principle ofthe pure or unobscured Mind. Surya represents the illumination


of the Ritam rising upon the mind; Swar is that plane of mentalconsciousness which directly receives the illumination. Vayu onthe other hand is always associated with the Prana or Life-Energy which contributes to the system all the ensemble of thosenervous activities that in man are the support of the mentalenergies governed by Indra. Their combination constitutes thenormal mentality of man. These two gods are invited in thehymn to come and partake together of the Soma-wine. Thiswine of Soma represents, as we have abundant proof in theVeda and especially in the ninth book, a collection of more thana hundred hymns addressed to the deity Soma, the intoxicationof the Ananda, the divine delight of being, inflowing upon themind from the supramental consciousness through the Ritam orTruth. If we accept these interpretations, we can easily translatethe hymn into its psychological significance.

Indra and Vayu awaken in consciousness (cetathah. ) to theflowings of the Soma-wine; that is to say, the mind-power andlife-power working together in human mentality are to awakento the inflowings of this Ananda, this Amrita, this delight andimmortality from above. They receive them into the full plen-itude of the mental and nervous energies, cetathah. sutanamvajinıvasu.1 The Ananda thus received constitutes a new actionpreparing immortal consciousness in the mortal and Indra andVayu are bidden to come and swiftly perfect these new workingsby the participation of the thought, a yatam upa nis.kr.tam maks.udhiya.2 For dhı is the thought-power, intellect or understanding.It is intermediate between the normal mentality represented bythe combination of Indra and Vayu and the Ritam or truth-consciousness.

It is at this point that Varuna and Mitra intervene and ourpassage begins. Without the psychological clue the connectionbetween the first part of the hymn and the close is not very clear,nor the relation between the couple Varuna-Mitra and the coupleIndra-Vayu. With that clue both connections become obvious;

1 V. 5.2 V. 6.


indeed they depend upon each other. For the earlier part of thehymn has for its subject the preparation first of the vital forcesrepresented by Vayu who is alone invoked in the three openingRiks, then of the mentality represented by the couple Indra-Vayufor the activities of the Truth-consciousness in the human being;the close has for its subject the working of the Truth on thementality so as to perfect the intellect and to enlarge the action.Varuna and Mitra are two of the four gods who represent thisworking of the Truth in the human mind and temperament.

In the style of the Veda when there is a transition of thiskind from one movement of thought to another developing outof it, the link of connection is often indicated by the repetition inthe new movement of an important word which has already oc-curred in the close of the movement that precedes. This principleof suggestion by echo, as one may term it, pervades the hymnsand is a mannerism common to all the Rishis. The connectingword here is dhı, thought or intellect. Dhı differs from the moregeneral word, mati, which means mentality or mental actiongenerally and which indicates sometimes thought, sometimesfeeling, sometimes the whole mental state. Dhı is the thought-mind or intellect; as understanding it holds all that comes toit, defines everything and puts it into the right place,3 or oftendhı indicates the activity of the intellect, particular thought orthoughts. It is by the thought that Indra and Vayu have beencalled upon to perfect the nervous mentality, nis.kr.tam dhiya.But this instrument, thought, has itself to be perfected, enriched,clarified before the mind can become capable of free commu-nication with the Truth-consciousness. Therefore Varuna andMitra, Powers of the Truth, are invoked “accomplishing a richlyluminous thought,” dhiyam ghr.tacım sadhanta.

This is the first occurrence in the Veda of the word ghr.ta, in amodified adjectival form, and it is significant that it should occuras an epithet of the Vedic word for the intellect, dhı. In otherpassages also we find it continually in connection with the wordsmanas, manıs.a or in a context where some activity of thought is

3 The root dhı means to hold or to place.


indicated. The root ghr. conveys the idea of a strong brightnessor heat such as that of fire or the summer sun. It means alsoto sprinkle or anoint, Greek chrio. It is capable of being usedto signify any liquid, but especially a bright, thick liquid. It isthe ambiguity of these two possible senses of which the VedicRishis took advantage to indicate by the word outwardly theclarified butter in the sacrifice, inwardly a rich and bright stateor activity of the brain-power, medha, as basis and substance ofilluminated thought. By dhiyam ghr.tacım is meant, therefore,the intellect full of a rich and bright mental activity.

Varuna and Mitra who accomplish or perfect this state ofthe intellect, are distinguished by two several epithets. Mitra isputadaks.a, possessed of a purified judgment; Varuna is risadas,he destroys all hurters or enemies. In the Veda there are nomerely ornamental epithets. Every word is meant to tell, to addsomething to the sense and bear a strict relation to the thoughtof the sentence in which it occurs. There are two obstacles whichprevent the intellect from being a perfect and luminous mirrorof the truth-consciousness; first, impurity of the discernment ordiscriminative faculty which leads to confusion of the Truth,secondly the many causes or influences which interfere withthe growth of the Truth by limiting its full application or bybreaking up the connections and harmony of the thoughts thatexpress it and which thus bring about poverty and falsificationof its contents. Just as the Gods in the Veda represent universalpowers descended from the Truth-consciousness which build upthe harmony of the worlds and in man his progressive perfection,so the influences that work against these objects are representedby hostile agencies, Dasyus and Vritras, who seek to break up, tolimit, to withhold and deny. Varuna in the Veda is always char-acterised as a power of wideness and purity; when, therefore,he is present in man as a conscious force of the Truth, all thatlimits and hurts the nature by introducing into it fault, sin andevil is destroyed by contact with him. He is risadas, destroyer ofthe enemy, of all that seek to injure the growth. Mitra, a powerlike Varuna of Light and Truth, especially represents Love, Joyand Harmony, the foundations of Mayas, the Vedic beatitude.


Working with the purity of Varuna and imparting that purityto the discernment, he enables it to get rid of all discords andconfusions and establish the right working of the strong andluminous intellect.

This progress enables the Truth-consciousness, the Ritam,to work in the human mentality. With the Ritam as the agency,r.tena, increasing the action of the Truth in man, r.tavr.dha, touch-ing or reaching the Truth, enabling, that is to say, the mentalconsciousness to come into successful contact with and pos-session of the Truth-consciousness, r.taspr.sa, Mitra and Varunaare able to enjoy the use of a vast effective will-power, kratumbr.hantam asathe. For it is the Will that is the chief effective agentof the inner sacrifice, but a will that is in harmony with the Truth,guided therefore by a purified discernment. The Will as it entersmore and more into the wideness of the Truth-consciousnessbecomes itself wide and vast, free from limitation in its viewand of hampering impediments in its effectivity. It works uravanibadhe, in the wideness where there is no obstacle or wall oflimitation.

Thus the two requisites on which the Vedic Rishis alwaysinsist are secured, Light and Power, the Light of the Truth work-ing in the knowledge, dhiyam ghr.tacım, the Power of the Truthworking in the effective and enlightened Will, kratum br.hantam.As a result Varuna and Mitra are shown to us in the closingverse of the hymn working in the full sense of their Truth, kavıtuvijata uruks.aya. Kavi, we have seen, means possessed of theTruth-consciousness and using its faculties of vision, inspiration,intuition, discrimination. Tuvijata is “multiply born”, for tuvi,meaning originally strength or force, is used like the Frenchword “force” in the sense of many. But by the birth of the godsis meant always in the Veda their manifestation; thus tuvijatasignifies “manifested multiply”, in many forms and activities.Uruks.aya means dwelling in the wideness, an idea which occursfrequently in the hymns; uru is equivalent to br.hat, the Vast, andindicates the infinite freedom of the Truth-consciousness. Thuswe have as the result of the increasing activities of the Ritamthe manifestation in the human being of the Powers of wideness


and purity, of joy and harmony, a manifestation rich in forms,seated in the wideness of the Ritam and using the faculties ofthe supra-mental consciousness.

This manifestation of the Powers of the Truth upholdsor confirms the discernment while it does the work, daks.amdadhate apasam. The discernment, now purified and supported,works in the sense of the Truth, as a power of the Truth andaccomplishes the perfection of the activities of Indra and Vayuby freeing the thought and the will from all defect and confusionin their working and results.

To confirm the interpretation we have put on the terms ofthis passage we may quote a Rik from the tenth Sukta of thefourth Mandala.

Adha hyagne krator bhadrasya daks.asya sadhoh. ,rathır r.tasya br.hato babhutha.

“Then indeed, O Agni, thou becomest the charioteer of thehappy will, the perfecting discernment, the Truth that is theVast.” We have here the same idea as in the first hymn of thefirst Mandala, the effective will that is the nature of the Truth-consciousness, kavikratuh. , and works out therefore in a state ofbeatitude the good, bhadram. We have in the phrase daks.asyasadhoh. at once a variant and explanation of the last phrase ofthe second hymn, daks.am apasam, the discernment perfectingand accomplishing the inner work in man. We have the vastTruth as the consummation of these two activities of power andknowledge, Will and Discernment, kratu and daks.a. Always thehymns of the Veda confirm each other by this reproduction ofthe same terms and ideas and the same relation of ideas. Thiswould not be possible unless they were based on a coherentdoctrine with a precise significance for standing terms such askavi, kratu, daks.a, bhadram, r.tam, etc. The internal evidence ofthe Riks themselves establishes that this significance is psycho-logical, as otherwise the terms lose their fixed value, their precisesense, their necessary connection, and their constant recurrencein relation to each other has to be regarded as fortuitous andvoid of reason or purpose.


We see then that in the second hymn we find again the samegoverning ideas as in the first. All is based on the central Vedicconception of the supra-mental or Truth-consciousness towardswhich the progressively perfected mentality of the human beinglabours as towards a consummation and a goal. In the firsthymn this is merely stated as the aim of the sacrifice and thecharacteristic work of Agni. The second hymn indicates the pre-liminary work of preparation, by Indra and Vayu, by Mitra andVaruna, of the ordinary mentality of man through the force ofthe Ananda and the increasing growth of the Truth.

We shall find that the whole of the Rig Veda is practically aconstant variation on this double theme, the preparation of thehuman being in mind and body and the fulfilment of the godheador immortality in him by his attainment and development of theTruth and the Beatitude.

Chapter VIII

The Ashwins — Indra —the Vishwadevas

THE THIRD hymn of Madhuchchhandas is again a hymnof the Soma sacrifice. It is composed, like the secondbefore it, in movements of three stanzas, the first ad-

dressed to the Ashwins, the second to Indra, the third to theVishwadevas, the fourth to the goddess Saraswati. In this hymnalso we have in the closing movement, in the invocation toSaraswati, a passage of clear psychological significance, of a fargreater clarity indeed than those that have already helped us tounderstand the secret thought of the Veda.

But this whole hymn is full of psychological suggestions andwe find in it the close connection and even identity which theVedic Rishis sought to establish and perfect between the threemain interests of the human soul, Thought and its final victori-ous illuminations, Action and its last supreme all-achieving puis-sances, Enjoyment and its highest spiritual ecstasies. The Somawine symbolises the replacing of our ordinary sense-enjoymentby the divine Ananda. That substitution is brought about bydivinising our thought-action, and as it progresses it helps in itsturn the consummation of the movement which has brought itabout. The Cow, the Horse, the Soma-Wine are the figures of thistriple sacrifice. The offering of ghr.ta, the clarified butter whichis the yield of the cow, the offering of the horse, asvamedha,the offering of the wine of Soma are its three principal forms orelements. We have also, less prominent, the offering of the cakewhich is possibly symbolic of the body, of Matter.

We commence with an invocation of the two Ashwins, thetwo Riders on the Horse, Castor and Polydeuces of the oldMediterranean mythology. They are supposed by the compara-tive mythologists to represent twin stars in the heavens which

The Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas 81

for some reason had a better fortune than the rest of the celestialhost and attracted the special adoration of the Aryans. Let us,however, see how they are described in the hymn we are study-ing. They are first described as “Ashwins, swift-footed lordsof bliss, much-enjoying, — dravatpan. ı subhaspatı purubhuja”.The word subh, like the words ratna and candra, is capable ofsignifying either light or enjoyment; but in this passage it occursin connection with the adjective purubhuja, “much-enjoying”,and the verb canasyatam, “take delight”, and must therefore betaken in the sense of weal or bliss.

Next, these twin gods are described as “Ashwins, divinesouls many-actioned, thought-holding” who accept and rejoicein the words of the Mantra “with an energetic thought”, —purudamsasa nara savıraya dhiya dhis.n. ya. Nr. in the Veda isapplicable both to gods and men and does not mean simplya man; it meant originally, I think, strong or active and thena male and is applied to the male gods, active divine souls orpowers, purus.as, opposed to the female deities, gnah. who aretheir energies. It still preserved in the minds of the Rishis muchof its original sense, as we see from the word nr.mn.a, strength,and the phrase nr.tama nr.n. am, strongest of the divine powers.Savas and its adjective savıra give the idea of energy, but al-ways with an association of the farther idea of flame or light;savıra is therefore a very appropriate epithet for dhı, thoughtfull of a shining or flashing energy. Dhis.n. ya is connected withdhis.an. a, intellect or understanding, and is rendered by Sayana“intellectual”, buddhimantau.

Again the Ashwins are described as “effectual in action,powers of the movement, fierce-moving in their paths,” dasranasatya rudravartanı. The Vedic epithets dasra and dasma arerendered by Sayana indifferently “destroying” or “beautiful” or“bountiful” according to his caprice or convenience. I connectit with the root das not in the sense of cutting, dividing, fromwhich it gets the two significances of destroying and giving, notin the sense of “discerning, seeing” from which it gets Sayana’ssignificance “beautiful”, darsanıya, but in the sense of doing,acting, shaping, accomplishing, as in purudamsasa in the second


Rik. Nasatya is supposed by some to be a patronymic; the oldgrammarians ingeniously fabricated for it the sense of “true,not false”; but I take it from nas to move. We must rememberthat the Ashwins are riders on the horse, that they are describedoften by epithets of motion, “swift-footed”, “fierce-moving intheir paths”; that Castor and Pollux in Graeco-Latin mythologyprotect sailors in their voyages and save them in storm andshipwreck and that in the Rig Veda also they are representedas powers that carry over the Rishis as in a ship or save themfrom drowning in the ocean. Nasatya may therefore very wellmean lords of the voyage, journey, or powers of the movement.Rudravartani is rendered by modern scholars “red-pathed”, anepithet supposed to be well-suited to stars and they instancethe parallel phrase, hiran. yavartani, having a golden or shiningpath. Certainly, rudra must have meant at one time, “shining,deep-coloured, red” like the roots rus. and rus, rudhira, “blood”,“red”, the Latin ruber, rutilus, rufus, all meaning red. Rodası,the dual Vedic word for heaven and earth, meant probably, likerajas and rocana, other Vedic words for the heavenly and earthlyworlds, “the shining”. On the other hand the sense of injury andviolence is equally inherent in this family of words and is almostuniversal in the various roots which form it. “Fierce” or “vio-lent” is therefore likely to be as good a sense for rudra as “red”.The Ashwins are both hiran. yavartanı and rudravartanı, becausethey are both powers of Light and of nervous force; in the formeraspect they have a bright gold movement, in the latter they areviolent in their movement. In one hymn (V.75.3) we have thecombination rudra hiran. yavartanı, violent and moving in thepaths of light; we can hardly with any respect for coherenceof sense understand it to mean that the stars are red but theirmovement or their path is golden.

Here then, in these three verses, are an extraordinary seriesof psychological functions to apply to two stars of a heavenlyconstellation! It is evident that if this was the physical origin ofthe Ashwins, they have as in Greek mythology long lost theirpurely stellar nature; they have acquired like Athene, goddess ofdawn, a psychological character and functions. They are riders


on the horse, the Ashwa, symbolic of force and especially of life-energy and nervous force, the Prana. Their common characteris that they are gods of enjoyment, seekers of honey; they arephysicians, they bring back youth to the old, health to the sick,wholeness to the maimed. Another characteristic is movement,swift, violent, irresistible; their rapid and indomitable chariot isa constant object of celebration and they are described here asswift-footed and violent in their paths. They are like birds intheir swiftness, like the mind, like the wind (V.77.3 and 78.1).They bring in their chariot ripe or perfected satisfactions to man,they are creators of bliss, Mayas. These indications are perfectlyclear. They show that the Ashwins are twin divine powers whosespecial function is to perfect the nervous or vital being in man inthe sense of action and enjoyment. But they are also powers ofTruth, of intelligent action, of right enjoyment. They are powersthat appear with the Dawn, effective powers of action bornout of the ocean of being who, because they are divine, areable to mentalise securely the felicities of the higher existenceby a thought-faculty which finds or comes to know that truesubstance and true wealth: —

Ya dasra sindhumatara, manotara rayın. am;dhiya deva vasuvida. (I.46.2)

They give that impelling energy for the great work which, havingfor its nature and substance the light of the Truth, carries manbeyond the darkness: —

Ya nah. pıparad asvina, jyotis.matı tamas tirah. ;tam asme rasatham is.am. (I.46.6)

They carry man in their ship to the other shore beyond thethoughts and states of the human mind, that is to say, to thesupramental consciousness, — nava matınam paraya (I.46.7).Surya, daughter of the Sun, Lord of the Truth, mounts theircar as their bride.

In the present hymn the Ashwins are invoked, as swift-moving lords of bliss who carry with them many enjoyments, totake delight in the impelling energies of the sacrifice, — yajvarır


is.o . . . canasyatam. These impelling forces are born evidentlyof the drinking of the Soma wine, that is to say, of the inflowof the divine Ananda. For the expressive words, girah. , that areto make new formations in the consciousness are already rising,the seat of the sacrifice has been piled, the vigorous juices ofthe Soma wine are pressed out.1 The Ashwins are to come aseffective powers of action, purudamsasa nara, to take delight inthe Words and to accept them into the intellect where they shallbe retained for the action by a thought full of luminous energy.2

They are to come to the offering of the Soma wine, in orderto effect the action of the sacrifice, dasra, as fulfillers of action,by giving to the delight of the action that violent movement oftheirs, rudravartanı, which carries them irresistibly on their pathand overcomes all opposition. They come as powers of the Aryanjourney, lords of the great human movement, Nasatya. We seethroughout that it is energy which these Riders on the Horse areto give; they are to take delight in the sacrificial energies, to takeup the word into an energetic thought, to bring to the sacrificetheir own violent movement on the path. And it is effectivenessof action and swiftness in the great journey that is the object ofthis demand for energy. I would call the attention of the readercontinually to the consistency of conception and coherence ofstructure, the easy clearness and precision of outline which thethought of the Rishis assumes by a psychological interpretation,so different from the tangled confusion and incoherent abrupt-ness of the interpretations which ignore the supreme traditionof the Veda as a book of wisdom and deepest knowledge.

We have then this rendering for the first three verses:“O Riders of the Steed, swift-footed, much-enjoying lords

of bliss, take delight in the energies of the sacrifice.“O Riders of the Steed, male souls effecting a manifold

action, take joy of the words, O holders in the intellect, by aluminously energetic thought.

“I have piled the seat of sacrifice, I have pressed out the

1 Yuvakavah. suta vr.ktabarhis.ah. .2 Savıraya dhiya dhis.n. ya vanatam girah. .


vigorous Soma juices; fulfillers of action, powers of the move-ment, come to them with your fierce speed on the path.”

As in the second hymn, so in the third the Rishi begins byinvoking deities who act in the nervous or vital forces. But therehe called Vayu who supplies the vital forces, brings his steeds oflife; here he calls the Ashwins who use the vital forces, ride onthe steed. As in the second hymn he proceeds from the vital ornervous action to the mental, he invokes in his second movementthe might of Indra. The out-pressings of the wine of delight desirehim, suta ime tvayavah. ; they desire the luminous mind to takepossession of them for its activities; they are purified, an. vıbhistana, “by the fingers and the body” as Sayana explains it, bythe subtle thought-powers of the pure mind and by extensionin the physical consciousness as it seems to me to mean. Forthese “ten fingers”, if they are fingers at all, are the ten fingersof Surya, daughter of the Sun, bride of the Ashwins. In the firsthymn of the ninth Mandala this same Rishi Madhuchchhandasexpands the idea which here he passes over so succinctly. Hesays, addressing the deity Soma, “The daughter of the Sun pu-rifies thy Soma as it flows abroad in her straining-vessel by acontinuous extension”, varen. a sasvata tana. And immediatelyhe adds, “The subtle ones seize it in their labour (or, in the greatwork, struggle, aspiration, samarye), the ten Brides, sisters in theheaven that has to be crossed”, a phrase that recalls at once theship of the Ashwins that carries us over beyond the thoughts;for Heaven is the symbol of the pure mental consciousness inthe Veda as is Earth of the physical consciousness. These sisterswho dwell in the pure mind, the subtle ones, an. vıh. , the tenbrides, dasa yos.an. ah. , are elsewhere called the ten Casters, dasaks.ipah. , because they seize the Soma and speed it on its way. Theyare probably identical with the ten Rays, dasa gavah. , some-times spoken of in the Veda. They seem to be described as thegrandchildren or descendants of the Sun, naptıbhir vivasvatah.(IX.14.5). They are aided in the task of purification by the sevenforms of Thought-consciousness, sapta dhıtayah. . Again we aretold that “Soma advances, heroic with his swift chariots, by theforce of the subtle thought, dhiya an. vya, to the perfected activity


(or perfected field) of Indra and takes many forms of thoughtto arrive at that vast extension (or, formation) of the godheadwhere the Immortals are” (IX.15.1, 2).

Es.a puru dhiyayate, br.hate devatataye;yatramr.tasa asate.

I have dwelt on this point in order to show how entirelysymbolical is the Soma-wine of the Vedic Rishis and how richlysurrounded with psychological conceptions, — as anyone willfind who cares to go through the ninth Mandala with its almostovercharged splendour of symbolic imagery and overflowingpsychological suggestions.

However that may be, the important point here is not theSoma and its purification but the psychological function ofIndra. He is addressed as Indra of the richly-various lustres,indra citrabhano. The Soma-juices desire him. He comes im-pelled by the thought, driven forward by the illumined thinkerwithin, dhiyes.ito viprajutah. , to the soul-thoughts of the Rishiwho has pressed out the wine of delight and seeks to man-ifest them in speech, in the inspired mantras; sutavata upabrahman. i vaghatah. . He comes with the speed and force of theillumined mind-power, in possession of his brilliant horses tothose thoughts, tutujana upa brahman. i harivah. , and the Rishiprays to him to confirm or hold the delight in the Soma offering,sute dadhis.va nas canah. . The Ashwins have brought and ener-gised the pleasure of the vital system in the action of the Ananda.Indra is necessary to hold that pleasure firmly in the illuminatedmind so that it may not fall away from the consciousness.

“Come, O Indra, with thy rich lustres, these Soma-juices de-sire thee; they are purified by the subtle powers and by extensionin body.

“Come, O Indra, impelled by the mind, driven forward bythe illumined thinker, to my soul-thoughts, I who have pouredout the Soma-juice and seek to express them in speech.

“Come, O Indra, with forceful speed to my soul-thoughts,O lord of the bright horses; hold firm the delight in the Soma-juice.”


The Rishi next passes to the Vishwadevas, all the gods or theall-gods. It has been disputed whether these Vishwadevas forma class by themselves or are simply the gods in their generality.I take it that the phrase means the universal collectivity of thedivine powers; for this sense seems to me best to correspond tothe actual expressions of the hymns in which they are invoked.In this hymn they are called for a general action which supportsand completes the functions of the Ashwins and Indra. They areto come to the sacrifice in their collectivity and divide amongthemselves, each evidently for the divine and joyous working ofhis proper activity, the Soma which the giver of the sacrifice dis-tributes to them; visve devasa a gata, dasvamso dasus.ah. sutam.In the next Rik the call is repeated with greater insistence; theyare to arrive swiftly, turn. ayah. , to the Soma offering or, it maymean, making their way through all the planes of consciousness,“waters”, which divide the physical nature of man from theirgodhead and are full of obstacles to communication betweenearth and heaven; apturah. sutam a ganta turn. ayah. . They are tocome like cattle hastening to the stalls of their rest at evening-tide, usra iva svasaran. i. Thus gladly arriving, they are gladly toaccept and cleave to the sacrifice and support it, bearing it up inits journey to its goal, in its ascent to the gods or to the home ofthe gods, the Truth, the Vast; medham jus.anta vahnayah. .

And the epithets of the Vishwadevas, qualifying their char-acter and the functions for which they are invited to the Soma-offering, have the same generality; they are common to all thegods and applied indifferently to any or all of them throughoutthe Veda. They are fosterers or increasers of man and upholdersof his labour and effort in the work, the sacrifice, — omasascars.an. ıdhr.to. Sayana renders these words protectors and sus-tainers of men. I need not enter here into a full justification ofthe significances which I prefer to give them; for I have alreadyindicated the philological method which I follow. Sayana himselffinds it impossible to attribute always the sense of protection tothe words derived from the root av, avas, uti, uma, etc. whichare so common in the hymns, and is obliged to give to the sameword in different passages the most diverse and unconnected


significances. Similarly, while it is easy to attribute the senseof “man” to the two kindred words cars.an. i and kr.s.t.i whenthey stand by themselves, this meaning seems unaccountablyto disappear in compound forms like vicars.an. i, visvacars.an. i,visvakr.s.t.i. Sayana himself is obliged to render visvacars.an. i “all-seeing” and not “all-man” or “all-human”. I do not admit thepossibility of such abysmal variations in fixed Vedic terms. Avcan mean to be, have, keep; contain, protect; become, create;foster, increase, thrive, prosper; gladden, be glad; but it is thesense of increasing or fostering which seems to me to prevail inthe Veda. Cars. and kr.s. were originally derivate roots from carand kr., both meaning to do, and the sense of laborious actionor movement still remains in kr.s., to drag, to plough. Cars.an. iand kr.s.t.i mean therefore effort, laborious action or work or elsethe doers of such action. They are two among the many words,(karma, apas, kara, kıri, duvas etc.), which are used to indicatethe Vedic work, the sacrifice, the toil of aspiring humanity, thearati of the Aryan.

The fostering or increasing of man in all his substance andpossessions, his continual enlargement towards the fullness andrichness of the vast Truth-consciousness, the upholding of him inhis great struggle and labour, this is the common preoccupationof the Vedic gods. Then, they are apturah. , they who cross thewaters, or as Sayana takes it, they who give the waters. This heunderstands in the sense of “rain-givers” and it is perfectly truethat all the Vedic gods are givers of the rain, the abundance (forvr.s.t.i, rain, has both senses) of heaven, sometimes described asthe solar waters, svarvatır apah. , or waters which carry in themthe light of the luminous heaven, Svar. But the ocean and thewaters in the Veda, as this phrase itself indicates, are the symbolof conscient being in its mass and in its movements. The godspour the fullness of these waters, especially the upper waters,the waters of heaven, the streams of the Truth, r.tasya dharah. ,across all obstacles into the human consciousness. In this sensethey are all apturah. . But man is also described as crossing thewaters over to his home in the Truth-consciousness and the godsas carrying him over; it is doubtful whether this may not be the


true sense here, especially as we have the two words apturah. . . .turn. ayah. close to each other in a connection that may well besignificant.

Again the gods are all free from effective assailants, freefrom the harm of the hurtful or opposing powers and there-fore the creative formations of their conscious knowledge, theirMaya, move freely, pervasively, attain their right goal, — asridhaehimayaso adruhah. . If we take into account the numerous pas-sages of the Veda which indicate the general object of the sacri-fice, of the work, of the journey, of the increase of the light andthe abundance of the waters to be the attainment of the Truth-consciousness, Ritam, with the resultant Bliss, Mayas, and thatthese epithets commonly apply to powers of the infinite, inte-gral Truth-consciousness we can see that it is this attainment ofthe Truth which is indicated in these three verses. The all-godsincrease man, they uphold him in the great work, they bringhim the abundance of the waters of Swar, the streams of theTruth, they communicate the unassailably integral and pervad-ing action of the Truth-consciousness with its wide formationsof knowledge, mayah. .

I have translated the phrase, usra iva svasaran. i, in themost external sense possible; but in the Veda even poeticalsimiles are seldom or never employed for mere decoration;they too are utilised to deepen the psychological sense andwith a figure of symbolic or double meaning. The word usrais always used in the Veda, like go, with the double senseof the concrete figure or symbol, the Bull or Cow, and atthe same time the psychological indication of the bright orluminous ones, the illumined powers of the Truth in man. Itis as such illumined powers that the all-gods have to comeand they come to the Soma-juice, svasaran. i, as if to seats orforms of peace or of bliss; for the root svas, like sas and manyothers, means both to rest and to enjoy. They are the powersof Truth entering into the outpourings of the Ananda in manas soon as that movement has been prepared by the vital andmental activity of the Ashwins and the pure mental activity ofIndra.


“O fosterers who uphold the doer in his work, O all-gods,come and divide the Soma-wine that I distribute.

“O all-gods who bring over to us the Waters, come pass-ing through to my Soma-offerings as illumined powers to yourplaces of bliss.

“O all-gods, you who are not assailed nor come to hurt,free-moving in your forms of knowledge, cleave to my sacrificeas its upbearers.”

And, finally, in the last movement of the hymn we have theclear and unmistakable indication of the Truth-consciousnessas the goal of the sacrifice, the object of the Soma-offering, theculmination of the work of the Ashwins, Indra and the All-godsin the vitality and in the mind. For these are the three Riks de-voted to Saraswati, the divine Word, who represents the streamof inspiration that descends from the Truth-consciousness, andthus limpidly runs their sense:

“May purifying Saraswati with all the plenitude of her formsof plenty, rich in substance by the thought, desire our sacrifice.

“She, the impeller to happy truths, the awakener in con-sciousness to right mentalisings, Saraswati, upholds the sacrifice.

“Saraswati by the perception awakens in consciousness thegreat flood (the vast movement of the Ritam) and illuminesentirely all the thoughts.”

This clear and luminous finale throws back its light on allthat has preceded it. It shows the intimate connection betweenthe Vedic sacrifice and a certain state of mind and soul, theinterdependence between the offering of the clarified butter andthe Soma juice and luminous thought, richness of psychologicalcontent, right states of the mind and its awaking and impulsionto truth and light. It reveals the figure of Saraswati as the goddessof the inspiration, of sruti. And it establishes the connectionbetween the Vedic rivers and psychological states of mind. Thepassage is one of those luminous hints which the Rishis haveleft scattered amidst the deliberate ambiguities of their symbolicstyle to guide us towards their secret.

Chapter IX

Saraswati and Her Consorts

THE SYMBOLISM of the Veda betrays itself with thegreatest clearness in the figure of the goddess Saraswati.In many of the other gods the balance of the internal

sense and the external figure is carefully preserved. The veilsometimes becomes transparent or its corners are lifted even forthe ordinary hearer of the Word; but it is never entirely removed.One may doubt whether Agni is anything more than the personi-fication of the sacrificial Fire or of the physical principle of Lightand Heat in things, or Indra anything more than the god of thesky and the rain or of physical Light, or Vayu anything morethan the divinity in the Wind and Air or at most of the physicalLife-breath. In the lesser gods the naturalistic interpretation hasless ground for confidence; for it is obvious that Varuna is notmerely a Vedic Uranus or Neptune, but a god with great andimportant moral functions; Mitra and Bhaga have the samepsychological aspect; the Ribhus who form things by the mindand build up immortality by works can with difficulty be crushedinto the Procrustean measure of a naturalistic mythology. Still byimputing a chaotic confusion of ideas to the poets of the Vedichymns the difficulty can be trampled upon, if not overcome.But Saraswati will submit to no such treatment. She is, plainlyand clearly, the goddess of the Word, the goddess of a divineInspiration.

If that were all, this would not carry us much farther thanthe obvious fact that the Vedic Rishis were not mere naturalisticbarbarians, but had their psychological ideas and were capableof creating mythological symbols which represent not only thoseobvious operations of physical Nature that interested their agri-cultural, pastoral and open-air life, but also the inner operationsof the mind and soul. If we have to conceive the history of an-cient religious thought as a progression from the physical to the


spiritual, from a purely naturalistic to an increasingly ethical andpsychological view of Nature and the world and the gods — andthis, though by no means certain, is for the present the acceptedview,1 — we must suppose that the Vedic poets were at leastalready advancing from the physical and naturalistic conceptionof the Gods to the ethical and the spiritual. But Saraswati is notonly the goddess of Inspiration, she is at one and the same timeone of the seven rivers of the early Aryan world. The question atonce arises, whence came this extraordinary identification? Andhow does the connection of the two ideas present itself in theVedic hymns? And there is more; for Saraswati is important notonly in herself but by her connections. Before proceeding fartherlet us cast a rapid and cursory glance at them to see what theycan teach us.

The association of a river with the poetical inspiration oc-curs also in the Greek mythology; but there the Muses are notconceived of as rivers; they are only connected in a not veryintelligible fashion with a particular earthly stream. This streamis the river Hippocrene, the fountain of the Horse, and to ac-count for its name we have a legend that it sprang from thehoof of the divine horse Pegasus; for he smote the rock withhis hoof and the waters of inspiration gushed out where themountain had been thus smitten. Was this legend merely a Greekfairy tale or had it any special meaning? And it is evident thatif it had any meaning, it must, since it obviously refers to apsychological phenomenon, the birth of the waters of inspira-tion, have had a psychological meaning; it must have been anattempt to put into concrete figures certain psychological facts.We may note that the word Pegasus, if we transliterate it intothe original Aryan phonetics, becomes Pajasa and is obviouslyconnected with the Sanskrit pajas, which meant originally force,

1 I do not think we have any real materials for determining the first origin and primitivehistory of religious ideas. What the facts really point to is an early teaching at oncepsychological and naturalistic, that is to say with two faces, of which the first came tobe more or less obscured, but never entirely effaced even in the barbarous races, evenin races like the tribes of North America. But this teaching, though prehistoric, wasanything but primitive.

Saraswati and Her Consorts 93

movement, or sometimes footing. In Greek itself it is connectedwith pege, a stream. There is, therefore, in the terms of thislegend a constant association with the image of a forceful move-ment of inspiration. If we turn to Vedic symbols we see thatthe Ashwa or Horse is an image of the great dynamic force ofLife, of the vital and nervous energy, and is constantly coupledwith other images that symbolise the consciousness. Adri, thehill or rock, is a symbol of formal existence and especially ofthe physical nature and it is out of this hill or rock that theherds of the Sun are released and the waters flow. The streamsof the madhu, the honey, the Soma, are said also to be milkedout of this Hill or Rock. The stroke of the Horse’s hoof onthe rock releasing the waters of inspiration would thus becomea very obvious psychological image. Nor is there any reason tosuppose that the old Greeks and Indians were incapable either ofsuch psychological observation or of putting it into the poeticaland mystic imagery which was the very body of the ancientMysteries.

We might indeed go farther and inquire whether there wasnot some original connection between the hero Bellerophon,slayer of Bellerus, who rides on the divine Horse, and IndraValahan, the Vedic slayer of Vala, the enemy who keeps forhimself the Light. But this would take us beyond the limits ofour subject. Nor does this interpretation of the Pegasus legendcarry us any farther than to indicate the natural turn of imagi-nation of the Ancients and the way in which they came to figurethe stream of inspiration as an actual stream of flowing water.Saraswati means, “she of the stream, the flowing movement”,and is therefore a natural name both for a river and for thegoddess of inspiration. But by what process of thought or asso-ciation does the general idea of the river of inspiration come tobe associated with a particular earthly stream? And in the Veda itis not a question of one river which by its surroundings, naturaland legendary, might seem more fitly associated with the ideaof sacred inspiration than any other. For here it is a questionnot of one, but of seven rivers always associated together inthe minds of the Rishis and all of them released together by


the stroke of the God Indra when he smote the Python whocoiled across their fountains and sealed up their outflow. It seemsimpossible to suppose that one river only in all this sevenfoldoutflowing acquired a psychological significance while the restwere associated only with the annual coming of the rains in thePunjab. The psychological significance of Saraswati carries withit a psychological significance for the whole symbol of the Vedicwaters.2

Saraswati is not only connected with other rivers but withother goddesses who are plainly psychological symbols andespecially with Bharati and Ila. In the later Puranic forms ofworship Saraswati is the goddess of speech, of learning and ofpoetry and Bharati is one of her names, but in the Veda Bharatiand Saraswati are different deities. Bharati is also called Mahi,the Large, Great or Vast. The three, Ila, Mahi or Bharati andSaraswati are associated together in a constant formula in thosehymns of invocation in which the gods are called by Agni to theSacrifice.

Il.a sarasvatı mahı, tisro devır mayobhuvah. ;barhih. sıdantvasridhah. .

“May Ila, Saraswati and Mahi, three goddesses who give birthto the bliss, take their place on the sacrificial seat, they whostumble not,” or “who come not to hurt” or “do no hurt.” Theepithet means, I think, they in whom there is no false movementwith its evil consequences, duritam, no stumbling into pitfallsof sin and error. The formula is expanded in Hymn 110 of thetenth Mandala:

A no yajnam bharatı tuyam etu,il.a manus.vad iha cetayantı;

Tisro devır barhir edam syonam,sarasvatı svapasah. sadantu.

2 The rivers have a symbolic sense in later Indian thought; as for instance Ganges,Yamuna and Saraswati and their confluence are in the Tantric imagery Yogic symbols,and they are used, though in a different way, in Yogic symbolism generally.


“May Bharati come speeding to our sacrifice and Ila hitherawakening our consciousness (or, knowledge or perceptions) inhuman wise, and Saraswati, — three goddesses sit on this blissfulseat, doing well the Work.”

It is clear and will become yet clearer that these three god-desses have closely connected functions akin to the inspirationalpower of Saraswati. Saraswati is the Word, the inspiration, asI suggest, that comes from the Ritam, the Truth-consciousness.Bharati and Ila must also be different forms of the same Word orknowledge. In the eighth hymn of Madhuchchhandas we havea Rik in which Bharati is mentioned under the name of Mahi.

Eva hyasya sunr.ta, virapsı gomatı mahı;pakva sakha na dasus.e.

“Thus Mahi for Indra full of the rays, overflowing in her abun-dance, in her nature a happy truth, becomes as if a ripe branchfor the giver of the sacrifice.”

The rays in the Veda are the rays of Surya, the Sun. Arewe to suppose that the goddess is a deity of the physical Lightor are we to translate “go” by cow and suppose that Mahi isfull of cows for the sacrificer? The psychological character ofSaraswati comes to our rescue against the last absurd supposi-tion, but it negatives equally the naturalistic interpretation. Thischaracterisation of Mahi, Saraswati’s companion in the sacrifice,the sister of the goddess of inspiration, entirely identified withher in the later mythology, is one proof among a hundred othersthat light in the Veda is a symbol of knowledge, of spiritualillumination. Surya is the Lord of the supreme Sight, the vastLight, br.haj jyotih. , or, as it is sometimes called, the true Light,r.tam jyotih. . And the connection between the words r.tam andbr.hat is constant in the Veda.

It seems to me impossible to see in these expressions any-thing else than the indication of a state of illumined conscious-ness the nature of which is that it is wide or large, br.hat, fullof the truth of being, satyam, and of the truth of knowledgeand action, r.tam. The gods have this consciousness. Agni, forinstance, is termed r.tacit, he who has the truth-consciousness.


Mahi is full of the rays of this Surya; she carries in her thisillumination. Moreover she is sunr.ta, she is the word of a bliss-ful Truth, even as it has been said of Saraswati that she is theimpeller of happy truths, codayitrı sunr.tanam. Finally, she isvirapsı, large or breaking out into abundance, a word whichrecalls to us that the Truth is also a Largeness, r.tam br.hat. Andin another hymn, (I.22.10), she is described as varutrı dhis.an. a,a widely covering or embracing Thought-power. Mahi, then, isthe luminous vastness of the Truth, she represents the Largeness,br.hat, of the superconscient in us containing in itself the Truth,r.tam. She is, therefore, for the sacrificer like a branch coveredwith ripe fruit.

Ila is also the word of the truth; her name has become iden-tical in a later confusion with the idea of speech. As Saraswati isan awakener of the consciousness to right thinkings or rightstates of mind, cetantı sumatınam, so also Ila comes to thesacrifice awakening the consciousness to knowledge, cetayantı.She is full of energy, suvıra, and brings knowledge. She also isconnected with Surya, the Sun, as when Agni, the Will is invoked(V.4.4) to labour by the rays of the Sun, Lord of the true Light,being of one mind with Ila, il.aya sajos.a yatamano rasmibhih.suryasya. She is the mother of the Rays, the herds of the Sun.Her name means she who seeks and attains and it contains thesame association of ideas as the words Ritam and Rishi. Ilamay therefore well be the vision of the seer which attains thetruth.

As Saraswati represents the truth-audition, sruti, whichgives the inspired word, so Ila represents dr.s.t.i, the truth-vision. If so, since dr.s.t.i and sruti are the two powers of theRishi, the Kavi, the Seer of the Truth, we can understand theclose connection of Ila and Saraswati. Bharati or Mahi is thelargeness of the Truth-consciousness which, dawning on man’slimited mind, brings with it the two sister Puissances. We canalso understand how these fine and living distinctions cameafterwards to be neglected as the Vedic knowledge declined andBharati, Saraswati, Ila melted into one.

We may note also that these three goddesses are said to


bring to birth for man the Bliss, Mayas. I have already insistedon the constant relation, as conceived by the Vedic seers, be-tween the Truth and the Bliss or Ananda. It is by the dawningof the true or infinite consciousness in man that he arrives outof this evil dream of pain and suffering, this divided creationinto the Bliss, the happy state variously described in Veda by thewords bhadram, mayas (love and bliss), svasti (the good state ofexistence, right being) and by others less technically used suchas varyam, rayih. , rayah. . For the Vedic Rishi Truth is the passageand the antechamber, the Bliss of the divine existence is the goal,or else Truth is the foundation, Bliss the supreme result.

Such, then, is the character of Saraswati as a psychologicalprinciple, her peculiar function and her relation to her most im-mediate connections among the gods. How far do these shed anylight on her relations as the Vedic river to her six sister streams?The number seven plays an exceedingly important part in theVedic system, as in most very ancient schools of thought. Wefind it recurring constantly, — the seven delights, sapta ratnani;the seven flames, tongues or rays of Agni, sapta arcis.ah. , saptajvalah. ; the seven forms of the Thought-principle, sapta dhıtayah. ;the seven Rays or Cows, forms of the Cow unslayable, Aditi,mother of the gods, sapta gavah. ; the seven rivers, the sevenmothers or fostering cows, sapta matarah. , sapta dhenavah. , aterm applied indifferently to the Rays and to the Rivers. Allthese sets of seven depend, it seems to me, upon the Vedic classi-fication of the fundamental principles, the tattvas, of existence.The enquiry into the number of these tattvas greatly interestedthe speculative mind of the ancients and in Indian philosophy wefind various answers ranging from the One upward and runninginto the twenties. In Vedic thought the basis chosen was thenumber of the psychological principles, because all existencewas conceived by the Rishis as a movement of conscious being.However merely curious or barren these speculations and classi-fications may seem to the modern mind, they were no mere drymetaphysical distinctions, but closely connected with a livingpsychological practice of which they were to a great extent thethought-basis, and in any case we must understand them clearly


if we wish to form with any accuracy an idea of this ancient andfar-off system.

In the Veda, then, we find the number of the principles vari-ously stated. The One was recognised as the basis and continent;in this One there were the two principles divine and human,mortal and immortal. The dual number is also otherwise ap-plied in the two principles, Heaven and Earth, Mind and Body,Soul and Nature, who are regarded as the father and motherof all beings. It is significant, however, that Heaven and Earth,when they symbolise two forms of natural energy, the mentaland the physical consciousness, are no longer the father andmother, but the two mothers. The triple principle was doublyrecognised, first in the threefold divine principle answering to thelater Sachchidananda, the divine existence, consciousness andbliss, and secondly in the threefold mundane principle, Mind,Life, Body, upon which is built the triple world of the Vedaand Puranas. But the full number ordinarily recognised is seven.This figure was arrived at by adding the three divine principles tothe three mundane and interpolating a seventh or link-principlewhich is precisely that of the Truth-consciousness, Ritam Brihat,afterwards known as Vijnana or Mahas. The latter term meansthe Large and is therefore an equivalent of Brihat. There areother classifications of five, eight, nine and ten and even, as itwould seem, twelve; but these do not immediately concern us.

All these principles, be it noted, are supposed to be reallyinseparable and omnipresent and therefore apply themselves toeach separate formation of Nature. The seven Thoughts, forinstance, are Mind applying itself to each of the seven planesas we would now call them and formulating Matter-mind, if wemay so call it, nervous mind, pure mind, truth-mind and so on tothe highest summit, parama paravat. The seven rays or cows areAditi the infinite Mother, the Cow unslayable, supreme Natureor infinite Consciousness, pristine source of the later idea ofPrakriti or Shakti, — the Purusha is in this early pastoral imagerythe Bull, Vrishabha, — the Mother of things taking form on theseven planes of her world-action as energy of conscious being.So also, the seven rivers are conscious currents corresponding to


the sevenfold substance of the ocean of being which appears tous formulated in the seven worlds enumerated by the Puranas.It is their full flow in the human consciousness which constitutesthe entire activity of the being, his full treasure of substance, hisfull play of energy. In the Vedic image, his cows drink of thewater of the seven rivers.

Should this imagery be admitted, and it is evident that ifonce such conceptions are supposed to exist, this would bethe natural imagery for a people living the life and placed inthe surroundings of the ancient Aryans, — quite as natural forthem and inevitable as for us the image of the “planes” withwhich theosophical thought has familiarised us, — the place ofSaraswati as one of the seven rivers becomes clear. She is thecurrent which comes from the Truth-principle, from the Ritamor Mahas, and we actually find this principle spoken of in theVeda, — in the closing passage of our third hymn for instance,— as the Great Water, maho arn. as, — an expression which givesus at once the origin of the later term, Mahas, — or sometimesmahan arn. avah. . We see in the third hymn the close connec-tion between Saraswati and this great water. Let us examinea little more closely this connection before we proceed to theconsideration of the Vedic cows and their relation to the godIndra and Saraswati’s close cousin the goddess Sarama. For itis necessary to define these relations before we can progresswith the scrutiny of Madhuchchhandas’ other hymns addressedwithout exception to the great Vedic deity, King of Heaven, who,according to our hypothesis, symbolises the Power of Mind andespecially the divine or self-luminous Mind in the human being.

Chapter X

The Image of theOceans and the Rivers

THE THREE riks of the third hymn of Madhuchchhandasin which Saraswati has been invoked, run as follows, inthe Sanskrit: —

Pavaka nah. sarasvatı, vajebhir vajinıvatı;yajnam vas.t.u dhiyavasuh. .

Codayitrı sunr.tanam, cetantı sumatınam;yajnam dadhe sarasvatı.

Maho arn.ah. sarasvatı, pra cetayati ketuna;dhiyo visva vi rajati.

The sense of the first two verses is clear enough when we knowSaraswati to be that power of the Truth which we call inspi-ration. Inspiration from the Truth purifies by getting rid of allfalsehood, for all sin according to the Indian idea is merelyfalsehood, wrongly inspired emotion, wrongly directed will andaction. The central idea of life and ourselves from which we startis a falsehood and all else is falsified by it. Truth comes to us asa light, a voice, compelling a change of thought, imposing a newdiscernment of ourselves and all around us. Truth of thoughtcreates truth of vision and truth of vision forms in us truth ofbeing, and out of truth of being (satyam) flows naturally truthof emotion, will and action. This is indeed the central notion ofthe Veda.

Saraswati, the inspiration, is full of her luminous plenitudes,rich in substance of thought. She upholds the Sacrifice, the of-fering of the mortal being’s activities to the divine by awakeninghis consciousness so that it assumes right states of emotion andright movements of thought in accordance with the Truth fromwhich she pours her illuminations and by impelling in it the rise

The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers 101

of those truths which, according to the Vedic Rishis, liberatethe life and being from falsehood, weakness and limitation andopen to it the doors of the supreme felicity.

By this constant awakening and impulsion, summed upin the word, perception, ketu, often called the divine percep-tion, daivya ketu, to distinguish it from the false mortal visionof things, — Saraswati brings into active consciousness in thehuman being the great flood or great movement, the Truth-consciousness itself, and illumines with it all our thoughts. Wemust remember that this truth-consciousness of the Vedic Rishisis a supra-mental plane, a level of the hill of being (adreh. sanu)which is beyond our ordinary reach and to which we have toclimb with difficulty. It is not part of our waking being, it ishidden from us in the sleep of the superconscient. We can thenunderstand what Madhuchchhandas means when he says thatSaraswati by the constant action of the inspiration awakens theTruth to consciousness in our thoughts.

But this line may, so far as the mere grammatical form ofit goes, be quite otherwise translated; we may take maho arn.asin apposition to Saraswati and render the verse “Saraswati, thegreat river, awakens us to knowledge by the perception andshines in all our thoughts.” If we understand by this expression,“the great river”, as Sayana seems to understand, the physicalriver in the Punjab, we get an incoherence of thought and ex-pression which is impossible except in a nightmare or a lunaticasylum. But it is possible to suppose that it means the greatflood of inspiration and that there is no reference to the greatocean of the Truth-Consciousness. Elsewhere, however, there isrepeated reference to the gods working by the vast power ofthe great flood (mahna mahato arn. avasya) where there is noreference to Saraswati and it is improbable that she should bemeant. It is true that in the Vedic writings Saraswati is spokenof as the secret self of Indra, — an expression, we may observe,that is void of sense if Saraswati is only a northern river andIndra the god of the sky, but has a very profound and strikingsignificance if Indra be the illumined Mind and Saraswati theinspiration that proceeds from the hidden plane of the supra-


mental Truth. But it is impossible to give Saraswati so importanta place with regard to the other gods as would be implied byinterpreting the phrase mahna mahato arn. avasya in the sense“by the greatness of Saraswati”. The gods act, it is continuallystated, by the power of the Truth, r.tena, but Saraswati is onlyone of the deities of the Truth and not even the most importantor universal of them. The sense I have given is, therefore, theonly rendering consistent with the general thought of the Vedaand with the use of the phrase in other passages.

Let us then start from this decisive fact put beyond doubt bythis passage — whether we take the great stream to be Saraswatiitself or the Truth-ocean — that the Vedic Rishis used the imageof water, a river or an ocean, in a figurative sense and as apsychological symbol, and let us see how far it takes us. Wenotice first that existence itself is constantly spoken of in theHindu writings, in Veda, Purana and even philosophical rea-soning and illustration as an ocean. The Veda speaks of twooceans, the upper and the lower waters. These are the ocean ofthe subconscient, dark and inexpressive, and the ocean of thesuperconscient, luminous and eternal expression but beyond thehuman mind. Vamadeva in the last hymn of the fourth Mandalaspeaks of these two oceans. He says that a honeyed wave climbsup from the ocean and by means of this mounting wave which isthe Soma (amsu) one attains entirely to immortality; that waveor that Soma is the secret name of the clarity (ghr.tasya, thesymbol of the clarified butter); it is the tongue of the gods; it isthe nodus (nabhi) of immortality.

Samudrad urmir madhuman udarad,upamsuna sam amr.tatvam anat.;

Ghr.tasya nama guhyam yad asti,jihva devanam amr.tasya nabhih. .

I presume there can be no doubt that the sea, the honey, theSoma, the clarified butter are in this passage at least psycholog-ical symbols. Certainly, Vamadeva does not mean that a waveor flood of wine came mounting up out of the salt water of theIndian Ocean or of the Bay of Bengal or even from the fresh


water of the river Indus or the Ganges and that this wine is asecret name for clarified butter. What he means to say is clearlythat out of the subconscient depths in us arises a honeyed waveof Ananda or pure delight of existence, that it is by this Anandathat we can arrive at immortality; this Ananda is the secret being,the secret reality behind the action of the mind in its shiningclarities. Soma, the god of the Ananda, the Vedanta also tellsus, is that which has become mind or sensational perception; inother words, all mental sensation carries in it a hidden delightof existence and strives to express that secret of its own being.Therefore Ananda is the tongue of the gods with which theytaste the delight of existence; it is the nodus in which all theactivities of the immortal state or divine existence are boundtogether. Vamadeva goes on to say, “Let us give expression tothis secret name of the clarity, — that is to say, let us bring outthis Soma wine, this hidden delight of existence; let us hold itin this world-sacrifice by our surrenderings or submissions toAgni, the divine Will or Conscious-Power which is the Masterof being. He is the four-horned Bull of the worlds and when helistens to the soul-thought of man in its self-expression, he ejectsthis secret name of delight from its hiding-place.”

Vayam nama pra bravama ghr.tasya,asmin yajne dharayama namobhih. ;

Upa brahma sr.n. avac chasyamanam,catuh. sr.ngo avamıd gaura etat.

Let us note, in passing, that since the wine and the clarified butterare symbolic, the sacrifice also must be symbolic. In such hymnsas this of Vamadeva’s the ritualistic veil so elaborately woven bythe Vedic mystics vanishes like a dissolving mist before our eyesand there emerges the Vedantic truth, the secret of the Veda.

Vamadeva leaves us in no doubt as to the nature of theOcean of which he speaks; for in the fifth verse he openly de-scribes it as the ocean of the heart, hr.dyat samudrat, out ofwhich rise the waters of the clarity, ghr.tasya dharah. ; they flow,he says, becoming progressively purified by the mind and theinner heart, antar hr.da manasa puyamanah. . And in the closing


verse he speaks of the whole of existence being triply established,first in the seat of Agni — which we know from other riks to bethe Truth-Consciousness, Agni’s own home, svam damam r.tambr.hat, — secondly, in the heart, the sea, which is evidently thesame as the heart-ocean, — thirdly, in the life of man.

Dhaman te visvam bhuvanam adhi sritam,antah. samudre hr.dyantar ayus.i.

The superconscient, the sea of the subconscient, the life ofthe living being between the two, — this is the Vedic idea ofexistence.

The sea of the superconscient is the goal of the rivers ofclarity, of the honeyed wave, as the sea of the subconscient inthe heart within is their place of rising. This upper sea is spokenof as the Sindhu, a word which may mean either river or ocean;but in this hymn it clearly means ocean. Let us observe theremarkable language in which Vamadeva speaks of these riversof the clarity. He says first that the gods sought and found theclarity, the ghr.tam, triply placed and hidden by the Panis in thecow, gavi. It is beyond doubt that go is used in the Veda in thedouble sense of Cow and Light; the Cow is the outer symbol,the inner meaning is the Light. The figure of the cows stolen andhidden by the Panis is constant in the Veda. Here it is evident thatas the sea is a psychological symbol — the heart-ocean, samudrehr.di, — and the Soma is a psychological symbol and the clarifiedbutter is a psychological symbol, the cow in which the gods findthe clarified butter hidden by the Panis must also symbolisean inner illumination and not physical light. The cow is reallyAditi, the infinite consciousness hidden in the subconscient, andthe triple ghr.tam is the triple clarity of the liberated sensationfinding its secret of delight, of the thought-mind attaining to lightand intuition and of the truth itself, the ultimate supra-mentalvision. This is clear from the second half of the verse in which it issaid, “One Indra produced, one Surya, one the gods fashioned bynatural development out of Vena”; for Indra is the Master of thethought-mind, Surya of the supra-mental light, Vena is Soma, themaster of mental delight of existence, creator of the sense-mind.


We may observe also in passing that the Panis here mustperforce be spiritual enemies, powers of darkness, and not Dra-vidian gods or Dravidian tribes or Dravidian merchants. In thenext verse Vamadeva says of the streams of the ghr.tam thatthey move from the heart-ocean shut up in a hundred prisons(pens) by the enemy so that they are not seen. Certainly, thisdoes not mean that rivers of ghee — or of water, either — risingfrom the heart-ocean or any ocean were caught on their wayby the wicked and unconscionable Dravidians and shut up in ahundred pens so that the Aryans or the Aryan gods could noteven catch a glimpse of them. We perceive at once that the enemy,Pani, Vritra of the hymns is a purely psychological conceptionand not an attempt of our forefathers to conceal the facts ofearly Indian history from their posterity in a cloud of tangledand inextricable myths. The Rishi Vamadeva would have stoodaghast at such an unforeseen travesty of his ritual images. Weare not even helped if we take ghr.ta in the sense of water, hr.dyasamudra in the sense of a delightful lake, and suppose that theDravidians enclose the water of the rivers with a hundred damsso that the Aryans could not even get a glimpse of them. Foreven if the rivers of the Punjab all flow out of one heart-pleasinglake, yet their streams of water cannot even so have been triplyplaced in a cow and the cow hidden in a cave by the cleverestand most inventive Dravidians.

“These move” says Vamadeva “from the heart-ocean;penned by the enemy in a hundred enclosures they cannotbe seen; I look towards the streams of the clarity, for in theirmidst is the Golden Reed. Entirely they stream like flowingrivers becoming purified by the heart within and the mind; thesemove, waves of the clarity, like animals under the mastery oftheir driver. As if on a path in front of the Ocean (sindhu,the upper ocean) the mighty ones move compact of forcefulspeed but limited by the vital force (vata, vayu), the streams ofclarity; they are like a straining horse which breaks its limits,as it is nourished by the waves.” On the very face of it this isthe poetry of a mystic concealing his sense from the profaneunder a veil of images which occasionally he suffers to grow


transparent to the eye that chooses to see. What he means isthat the divine knowledge is all the time flowing constantlybehind our thoughts, but is kept from us by the internal enemieswho limit our material of mind to the sense-action and sense-perception so that though the waves of our being beat on banksthat border upon the superconscient, the infinite, they are limitedby the nervous action of the sense-mind and cannot reveal theirsecret. They are like horses controlled and reined in; only whenthe waves of the light have nourished their strength to the fulldoes the straining steed break these limits and they flow freelytowards That from which the Soma-wine is pressed out and thesacrifice is born.

Yatra somah. suyate yatra yajno,ghr.tasya dhara abhi tat pavante.

This goal is, again, explained to be that which is all honey, —ghr.tasya dhara madhumat pavante; it is the Ananda, the divineBeatitude. And that this goal is the Sindhu, the superconscientocean, is made clear in the last rik, where Vamadeva says, “Maywe taste that honeyed wave of thine” — of Agni, the divinePurusha, the four-horned Bull of the worlds — “which is bornein the force of the Waters where they come together.”

Apam anıke samithe ya abhr.tas,tam asyama madhumantam ta urmim.

We find this fundamental idea of the Vedic Rishis broughtout in the Hymn of Creation (X.129) where the subconscient isthus described. “Darkness hidden by darkness in the beginningwas this all, an ocean without mental consciousness . . . out ofit the One was born by the greatness of Its energy. It first movedin it as desire which was the first seed of mind. The Mastersof Wisdom found out in the non-existent that which builds upthe existent; in the heart they found it by purposeful impulsionand by the thought-mind. Their ray was extended horizontally;there was something above, there was something below.” In thispassage the same ideas are brought out as in Vamadeva’s hymnbut without the veil of images. Out of the subconscient ocean


the One arises in the heart first as desire; he moves there in theheart-ocean as an unexpressed desire of the delight of existenceand this desire is the first seed of what afterwards appears as thesense-mind. The gods thus find out a means of building up theexistent, the conscious being, out of the subconscient darkness;they find it in the heart and bring it out by the growth of thoughtand purposeful impulsion, pratıs.ya, by which is meant mentaldesire as distinguished from the first vague desire that arises outof the subconscient in the merely vital movements of nature. Theconscious existence which they thus create is stretched out as itwere horizontally between two other extensions; below is thedark sleep of the subconscient, above is the luminous secrecy ofthe superconscient. These are the upper and the lower ocean.

This Vedic imagery throws a clear light on the similar sym-bolic images of the Puranas, especially on the famous symbolof Vishnu sleeping after the pralaya on the folds of the snakeAnanta upon the ocean of sweet milk. It may perhaps be objectedthat the Puranas were written by superstitious Hindu priests orpoets who believed that eclipses were caused by a dragon eatingthe sun and moon and could easily believe that during the peri-ods of non-creation the supreme Deity in a physical body wentto sleep on a physical snake upon a material ocean of real milkand that therefore it is a vain ingenuity to seek for a spiritualmeaning in these fables. My reply would be that there is in factno need to seek for such meanings; for these very superstitiouspoets have put them there plainly on the very surface of the fablefor everybody to see who does not choose to be blind. For theyhave given a name to Vishnu’s snake, the name Ananta, andAnanta means the Infinite; therefore they have told us plainlyenough that the image is an allegory and that Vishnu, the all-pervading Deity, sleeps in the periods of non-creation on thecoils of the Infinite. As for the ocean, the Vedic imagery showsus that it must be the ocean of eternal existence and this oceanof eternal existence is an ocean of absolute sweetness, in otherwords, of pure Bliss. For the sweet milk (itself a Vedic image)has, evidently, a sense not essentially different from the madhu,honey or sweetness, of Vamadeva’s hymn.


Thus we find that both Veda and Purana use the samesymbolic images; the ocean is for them the image of infiniteand eternal existence. We find also that the image of the riveror flowing current is used to symbolise a stream of consciousbeing. We find that Saraswati, one of the seven rivers, is theriver of inspiration flowing from the Truth-consciousness. Wehave the right then to suppose that the other six rivers are alsopsychological symbols.

But we need not depend entirely on hypothesis and infer-ence, however strong and entirely convincing. As in the hymnof Vamadeva we have seen that the rivers, ghr.tasya dharah. , arethere not rivers of clarified butter or rivers of physical water,but psychological symbols, so we find in other hymns the samecompelling evidence as to the image of the seven rivers. For thispurpose I will examine one more hymn, the first Sukta of thethird Mandala sung by the Rishi Vishwamitra to the god Agni;for here he speaks of the seven rivers in language as remarkableand unmistakable as the language of Vamadeva about the riversof clarity. We shall find precisely the same ideas recurring in quitedifferent contexts in the chants of these two sacred singers.

Chapter XI

The Seven Rivers

THE VEDA speaks constantly of the waters or the rivers,especially of the divine waters, apo devıh. or apo divyah. ,and occasionally of the waters which carry in them the

light of the luminous solar world or the light of the Sun, svarvatırapah. . The passage of the waters effected by the Gods or by manwith the aid of the Gods is a constant symbol. The three greatconquests to which the human being aspires, which the Godsare in constant battle with the Vritras and Panis to give to manare the herds, the waters and the Sun or the solar world, ga apah.svah. . The question is whether these references are to the rainsof heaven, the rivers of Northern India possessed or assailedby the Dravidians — the Vritras being sometimes the Dravidiansand sometimes their gods, the herds possessed or robbed fromthe Aryan settlers by the indigenous “robbers” — the Panis whohold or steal the herds being again sometimes the Dravidians andsometimes their gods; or is there a deeper, a spiritual meaning?Is the winning of Swar simply the recovery of the sun from itsshadowing by the storm-cloud or its seizure by eclipse or itsconcealment by the darkness of Night? For here at least therecan be no withholding of the sun from the Aryans by human“black-skinned” and “noseless” enemies. Or does the conquestof Swar mean simply the winning of heaven by sacrifice? And ineither case what is the sense of this curious collocation of cows,waters and the sun or cows, waters and the sky? Is it not rather asystem of symbolic meanings in which the herds, indicated by theword gah. in the sense both of cows and rays of light, are the illu-minations from the higher consciousness which have their originin the Sun of Light, the Sun of Truth? Is not Swar itself the worldor plane of immortality governed by that Light or Truth of theall-illumining Sun called in Veda the vast Truth, r.tam br.hat, andthe true Light? and are not the divine waters, apo devıh. , divyah.


or svarvatıh. , the floods of this higher consciousness pouring onthe mortal mind from that plane of immortality?

It is, no doubt, easy to point to passages or hymns in whichon the surface there seems to be no need of any such interpreta-tion and the sukta can be understood as a prayer or praise forthe giving of rain or an account of a battle on the rivers of thePunjab. But the Veda cannot be interpreted by separate passagesor hymns. If it is to have any coherent or consistent meaning,we must interpret it as a whole. We may escape our difficultiesby assigning to svar or gah. entirely different senses in differentpassages — just as Sayana sometimes finds in gah. the sense ofcows, sometimes rays and sometimes, with an admirable light-heartedness, compels it to mean waters.1 But such a system ofinterpretation is not rational merely because it leads to a “ratio-nalistic” or “common-sense” result. It rather flouts both reasonand common sense. We can indeed arrive by it at any result weplease, but no reasonable and unbiassed mind can feel convincedthat that result was the original sense of the Vedic hymns.

But if we adopt a more consistent method, insuperable diffi-culties oppose themselves to the purely material sense. We havefor instance a hymn (VII.49) of Vasishtha to the divine waters,apo devıh. , apo divyah. , in which the second verse runs, “Thedivine waters that flow whether in channels dug or self-born,they whose movement is towards the ocean, pure, purifying, —may those waters foster me.” Here, it will be said, the senseis quite clear; it is to material waters, earthly rivers, canals, —or, if the word khanitrimah. means simply “dug”, then wells, —that Vasishtha addresses his hymn and divyah. , divine, is onlyan ornamental epithet of praise; or even perhaps we may renderthe verse differently and suppose that three kinds of water aredescribed, — the waters of heaven, that is to say the rain, thewater of wells, the water of rivers. But when we study the hymnas a whole this sense can no longer stand. For thus it runs:

1 So also he interprets the all-important Vedic word r.tam sometimes as sacrifice, some-times as truth, sometimes as water, and all these different senses in a single hymn of fiveor six verses!

The Seven Rivers 111

“May those divine waters foster me, the eldest (or greatest)of the ocean from the midst of the moving flood that go puri-fying, not settling down, which Indra of the thunderbolt, theBull, clove out. The divine waters that flow whether in channelsdug or self-born, whose movement is towards the Ocean, —may those divine waters foster me. In the midst of whom KingVaruna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood ofcreatures, they that stream honey and are pure and purifying, —may those divine waters foster me. In whom Varuna the king, inwhom Soma, in whom all the Gods have the intoxication of theenergy, into whom Agni Vaishwanara has entered, may thosedivine waters foster me.”

It is evident that Vasishtha is speaking here of the samewaters, the same streams that Vamadeva hymns, the watersthat rise from the ocean and flow into the ocean, the honeyedwave that rises upward from the sea, from the flood that is theheart of things, streams of the clarity, ghr.tasya dharah. . Theyare the floods of the supreme and universal conscious existencein which Varuna moves looking down on the truth and thefalsehood of mortals, — a phrase that can apply neither to thedescending rains nor to the physical ocean. Varuna in the Vedais not an Indian Neptune, neither is he precisely, as the Europeanscholars at first imagined, the Greek Ouranos, the sky. He is themaster of an ethereal wideness, an upper ocean, of the vastnessof being, of its purity; in that vastness, it is elsewhere said, hehas made paths in the pathless infinite along which Surya, theSun, the Lord of Truth and the Light can move. Thence helooks down on the mingled truths and falsehoods of the mortalconsciousness. And we have farther to note that these divinewaters are those which Indra has cloven out and made to flowupon the earth, — a description which throughout the Veda isapplied to the seven rivers.

If there were any doubt whether these waters of Vasishtha’sprayer are the same as the waters of Vamadeva’s great hymn,madhuman urmih. , ghr.tasya dharah. , it is entirely removed byanother Sukta of the sage Vasishtha, (VII.47). In the forty-ninthhymn he refers briefly to the divine waters as honey-streaming,


madhuscutah. and speaks of the Gods enjoying in them the in-toxication of the energy, urjam madanti; from this we can gatherthat the honey or sweetness is the madhu, the Soma, the wineof the Ananda, of which the Gods have the ecstasy. But in theforty-seventh hymn he makes his meaning unmistakably clear.

“O Waters, that supreme wave of yours, the drink of Indra,which the seekers of the Godhead have made for themselves,that pure, inviolate, clarity-streaming, honeyed (ghr.taprus.ammadhumantam) wave of you may we today enjoy. O Waters,may the son of the waters (Agni), he of the swift rushings, fosterthat most honeyed wave of you; that wave of yours in whichIndra with the Vasus is intoxicated with ecstasy, may we whoseek the Godhead taste today. Strained through the hundredpurifiers, ecstatic by their self-nature, they are divine and moveto the goal of the movement of the Gods (the supreme ocean);they limit not the workings of Indra: offer to the rivers a foodof oblation full of the clarity (ghr.tavat). May the rivers whichthe sun has formed by his rays, from whom Indra clove out amoving wave, establish for us the supreme good. And do ye, Ogods, protect us ever by states of felicity.”

Here we have Vamadeva’s madhuman urmih. , the sweetintoxicating wave, and it is plainly said that this honey, thissweetness is the Soma, the drink of Indra. That is farther madeclear by the epithet satapavitrah. which can only refer in theVedic language to the Soma; and let us note that it is an epithetof the rivers themselves and that the honeyed wave is broughtflowing from them by Indra, its passage being cloven out onthe mountains by the thunderbolt that slew Vritra. Again it ismade clear that these waters are the seven rivers released byIndra from the hold of Vritra, the Besieger, the Coverer and sentflowing down upon the earth.

What can these rivers be whose wave is full of Soma wine,full of the ghr.ta, full of urj, the energy? What are these watersthat flow to the goal of the gods’ movement, that establish forman the supreme good? Not the rivers of the Punjab; no wildestassumption of barbarous confusion or insane incoherence inthe mentality of the Vedic Rishis can induce us to put such a


construction upon such expressions. Obviously these are thewaters of the Truth and the Bliss that flow from the supremeocean. These rivers flow not upon earth, but in heaven; they areprevented by Vritra the Besieger, the Coverer from flowing downupon the earth-consciousness in which we mortals live till Indra,the god-mind, smites the Coverer with his flashing lightnings andcuts out a passage on the summits of that earth-consciousnessdown which they can flow. Such is the only rational, coherentand sensible explanation of the thought and language of theVedic sages. For the rest, Vasishtha makes it clear enough to us;for he says that these are the waters which Surya has formedby his rays and which, unlike earthly movements, do not limitor diminish the workings of Indra, the supreme Mind. Theyare, in other words, the waters of the Vast Truth, r.tam br.hatand, as we have always seen that this Truth creates the Bliss,so here we find that these waters of the Truth, r.tasya dharah. ,as they are plainly called in other hymns (e.g. V.12.2, “O per-ceiver of the Truth, perceive the Truth alone, cleave out manystreams of the Truth”), establish for men the supreme goodand the supreme good2 is the felicity, the bliss of the divineexistence.

Still, neither in these hymns nor in Vamadeva’s is there anexpress mention of the seven rivers. We will turn therefore tothe first hymn of Vishwamitra, his hymn to Agni, from its sec-ond to its fourteenth verse. The passage is a long one, but it issufficiently important to cite and translate in full.

2. Prancam yajnam cakr.ma vardhatam gıh. ,samidbhir agnim namasa duvasyan;

Divah. sasasur vidatha kavınam,gr.tsaya cit tavase gatum ıs.uh. .

3. Mayo dadhe medhirah. putadaks.o,divah. subandhur janus.a pr.thivyah. ;

Avindan nu darsatam apsvantar,devaso agnim apasi svasr.n. am.

2 The word indeed is usually understood as “felicity”.


4. Avardhayan subhagam sapta yahvıh. ,svetam jajnanam arus.am mahitva;

Sisum na jatam abhyarur asva,devaso agnim janiman vapus.yan.

5. Sukrebhir angai raja atatanvan,kratum punanah. kavibhih. pavitraih. ;

Socir vasanah. pari ayur apam,sriyo mimıte br.hatır anunah. .

6. Vavraja sım anadatır adabdha,divo yahvır avasana anagnah. ;

Sana atra yuvatayah. sayonır,ekam garbham dadhire sapta van. ıh. .

7. Stırn. a asya samhato visvarupa,ghr.tasya yonau sravathe madhunam;

Asthur atra dhenavah. pinvamana,mahı dasmasya matara samıcı.

8. Babhran. ah. suno sahaso vyadyaud,dadhanah. sukra rabhasa vapums.i;

Scotanti dhara madhuno ghr.tasya,vr.s.a yatra vavr.dhe kavyena.

9. Pitus cid udhar janus.a viveda,vyasya dhara asr.jad vi dhenah. ;

Guha carantam sakhibhih. sivebhir,divo yahvıbhir na guha babhuva.

10. Pitus ca garbham janitus ca babhre,purvır eko adhayat pıpyanah. ;

Vr.s.n. e sapatnı sucaye sabandhu,ubhe asmai manus.ye ni pahi.

11. Urau mahan anibadhe vavardha,apo agnim yasasah. sam hi purvıh. ;

R. tasya yonav asayad damuna,jamınam agnir apasi svasr.n. am.

12. Akro na babhrih. samithe mahınam,didr.ks.eyah. sunave bha-r.jıkah. ;

Ud usriya janita yo jajana,apam garbho nr.tamo yahvo agnih. .


13. Apam garbham darsatam os.adhınam,vana jajana subhaga virupam;

Devasas cin manasa sam hi jagmuh. ,panis.t.ham jatam tavasam duvasyan.

14. Br.hanta id bhanavo bha-r.jıkam,agnim sacanta vidyuto na sukrah. ;

Guheva vr.ddham sadasi sve antar,apara urve amr.tam duhanah. .

“We have made the sacrifice to ascend towards the supreme,let the Word increase. With kindlings of his fire, with obeisanceof submission they set Agni to his workings; they have given ex-pression in the heaven to the knowings of the seers and they de-sire a passage for him in his strength, in his desire of the word. (2)

“Full of intellect, purified in discernment, the perfect friend(or, perfect builder) from his birth of Heaven and of Earth,he establishes the Bliss; the gods discovered Agni visible in theWaters, in the working of the sisters. (3)

“The seven Mighty Ones increased him who utterly enjoysfelicity, white in his birth, ruddy when he has grown. Theymoved and laboured about him, the Mares around the newbornchild; the gods gave body to Agni in his birth. (4)

“With his pure bright limbs he extended and formed themiddle world purifying the will-to-action by the help of thepure lords of wisdom; wearing light as a robe about all the lifeof the Waters he formed in himself glories vast and without anydeficiency. (5)

“He moved everywhere about the Mighty Ones of Heaven,and they devoured not, neither were overcome, — they werenot clothed, neither were they naked. Here the eternal and everyoung goddesses from one womb held the one Child, they theSeven Words. (6)

“Spread out were the masses of him in universal forms in thewomb of the clarity, in the flowings of the sweetnesses; here thefostering Rivers stood nourishing themselves; the two Mothersof the accomplishing god became vast and harmonised. (7)

“Borne by them, O child of Force, thou didst blaze out


holding thy bright and rapturous embodiments; out flow thestreams of the sweetness, the clarity, where the Bull of theabundance has grown by the Wisdom. (8)

“He discovered at his birth the source of the abundanceof the Father and he loosed forth wide His streams and wideHis rivers. By his helpful comrades and by the Mighty Ones ofHeaven he found Him moving in the secret places of existence,yet himself was not lost in their secrecy. (9)

“He bore the child of the Father and of him that begot him;one, he fed upon his many mothers in their increasing. In thispure Male both these powers in man (Earth and Heaven) havetheir common lord and lover; do thou guard them both. (10)

“Great in the unobstructed Vast he increased; yea, manyWaters victoriously increased Agni. In the source of the Truthhe lay down; there he made his home, Agni in the working ofthe undivided Sisters. (11)

“As the mover in things and as their sustainer he in themeeting of the Great Ones, seeking vision, straight in his lustresfor the presser-out of the Soma wine, he who was the father ofthe Radiances, gave them now their higher birth, — the child ofthe Waters, the mighty and most strong Agni. (12)

“To the visible Birth of the waters and of the growths ofEarth the goddess of Delight now gave birth in many forms, sheof the utter felicity. The gods united in him by the mind andthey set him to his working who was born full of strength andmighty for the labour. (13)

“Those vast shinings clove to Agni straight in his lustre andwere like bright lightnings; from him increasing in the secretplaces of existence in his own seat within the shoreless Vast theymilked out Immortality.” (14)

Whatever may be the meaning of this passage, — and it isabsolutely clear that it has a mystic significance and is no meresacrificial hymn of ritualistic barbarians, — the seven rivers, thewaters, the seven sisters cannot here be the seven rivers of thePunjab. The waters in which the gods discovered the visibleAgni cannot be terrestrial and material streams; this Agni who


increases by knowledge and makes his home and rest in thesource of the Truth, of whom Heaven and Earth are the wivesand lovers, who is increased by the divine waters in the unob-structed Vast, his own seat, and dwelling in that shoreless infinityyields to the illumined gods the supreme Immortality, cannot bethe god of physical Fire. In this passage as in so many others themystical, the spiritual, the psychological character of the burdenof the Veda reveals itself not under the surface, not behind a veilof mere ritualism, but openly, insistently, — in a disguise indeed,but a disguise that is transparent, so that the secret truth ofthe Veda appears here, like the rivers of Vishwamitra’s hymn,“neither veiled nor naked”.

We see that these Waters are the same as those of Vamadeva’shymn, of Vasishtha’s, closely connected with the clarity and thehoney, — ghr.tasya yonau sravathe madhunam, scotanti dharamadhuno ghr.tasya; they lead to the Truth, they are themselvesthe source of the Truth, they flow in the unobstructed and shore-less Vast as well as here upon the earth. They are figured asfostering cows (dhenavah. ), mares (asvah. ), they are called saptavan. ıh. , the seven Words of the creative goddess Vak, — Speech,the expressive power of Aditi, of the supreme Prakriti who isspoken of as the Cow just as the Deva or Purusha is described inthe Veda as Vrishabha or Vrishan, the Bull. They are thereforethe seven strands of all being, the seven streams or currents orforms of movement of the one conscious existence.

We shall find that in the light of the ideas which we havediscovered from the very opening of the Veda in Madhuch-chhandas’ hymns and in the light of the symbolic interpretationswhich are now becoming clear to us, this passage apparently sofigured, mysterious, enigmatical becomes perfectly straightfor-ward and coherent, as indeed do all the passages of the Vedawhich seem now almost unintelligible when once their right clueis found. We have only to fix the psychological function of Agni,the priest, the fighter, the worker, the truth-finder, the winner ofbeatitude for man; and that has already been fixed for us in thefirst hymn of the Rig Veda by Madhuchchhandas’ descriptionof him, — “the Will in works of the Seer true and most rich in


varied inspiration.” Agni is the Deva, the All-Seer, manifestedas conscious-force or, as it would be called in modern language,Divine or Cosmic Will, first hidden and building up the eternalworlds, then manifest, “born”, building up in man the Truthand the Immortality.

Gods and men, says Vishwamitra in effect, kindle this divineforce by lighting the fires of the inner sacrifice; they enable it towork by their adoration and submission to it; they express inheaven, that is to say, in the pure mentality which is symbol-ised by Dyaus, the knowings of the Seers, in other words theilluminations of the Truth-consciousness which exceeds Mind;and they do this in order to make a passage for this divine forcewhich in its strength seeking always to find the word of rightself-expression aspires beyond mind. This divine will carrying inall its workings the secret of the divine knowledge, kavikratuh. ,befriends or builds up the mental and physical consciousness inman, divah. pr.thivyah. , perfects the intellect, purifies the discern-ment so that they grow to be capable of the “knowings of theseers” and by the superconscient Truth thus made conscient inus establishes firmly the Beatitude (vs. 2-3).

The rest of the passage describes the ascent of this divineconscious-force, Agni, this Immortal in mortals who in the sac-rifice takes the place of the ordinary will and knowledge of man,from the mortal and physical consciousness to the immortalityof the Truth and the Beatitude. The Vedic Rishis speak of fivebirths for man, five worlds of creatures where works are done,panca janah. , panca kr.s.t.ıh. or ks.itıh. . Dyaus and Prithivi representthe pure mental and the physical consciousness; between them isthe Antariksha, the intermediate or connecting level of the vitalor nervous consciousness. Dyaus and Prithivi are Rodasi, ourtwo firmaments; but these have to be overpassed, for then wefind admission to another heaven than that of the pure mind —to the wide, the Vast which is the basis, the foundation (budhna)of the infinite consciousness, Aditi. This Vast is the Truth whichsupports the supreme triple world, those highest steps or seats(padani, sadamsi) of Agni, of Vishnu, those supreme Names ofthe Mother, the cow, Aditi. The Vast or Truth is declared to be


the own or proper seat or home of Agni, svam damam, svamsadah. . Agni is described in this hymn ascending from earth tohis own seat.

This divine Power is found by the gods visible in the Waters,in the working of the Sisters. These are the sevenfold waters ofthe Truth, the divine waters brought down from the heightsof our being by Indra. First it is secret in the earth’s growths,os.adhıh. , the things that hold her heats, and has to be broughtout by a sort of force, by a pressure of the two aran. is, earth andheaven. Therefore it is called the child of the earth’s growthsand the child of the earth and heaven; this immortal Force isproduced by man with pain and difficulty from the workings ofthe pure mind upon the physical being. But in the divine watersAgni is found visible and easily born in all his strength and in allhis knowledge and in all his enjoyment, entirely white and pure,growing ruddy with his action as he increases (v. 3). From hisvery birth the Gods give him force and splendour and body; theseven mighty Rivers increase him in his joy; they move about thisgreat newborn child and labour over him as the Mares, asvah.(v. 4).

The rivers, usually named dhenavah. , fostering cows, arehere described as asvah. , Mares, because while the Cow isthe symbol of consciousness in the form of knowledge, theHorse is the symbol of consciousness in the form of force.Ashwa, the Horse, is the dynamic force of Life, and the riverslabouring over Agni on the earth become the waters of Life,of the vital dynamis or kinesis, the Prana, which moves andacts and desires and enjoys. Agni himself begins as materialheat and power, manifests secondarily as the Horse and thenonly becomes the heavenly fire. His first work is to give as thechild of the Waters its full form and extension and purity tothe middle world, the vital or dynamic plane, raja atatanvan.He purifies the nervous life in man pervading it with his ownpure bright limbs, lifting upward its impulsions and desires,its purified will in works (kratum) by the pure powers of thesuper-conscient Truth and Wisdom, kavibhih. pavitraih. . So hewears his vast glories, no longer the broken and limited activity


of desires and instincts, all about the life of the Waters (vs.4-5).

The sevenfold waters thus rise upward and become thepure mental activity, the Mighty Ones of Heaven. They therereveal themselves as the first eternal ever-young energies, sepa-rate streams but of one origin — for they have all flowed fromthe one womb of the super-conscient Truth — the seven Wordsor fundamental creative expressions of the divine Mind, saptavan. ıh. . This life of the pure mind is not like that of the nervous lifewhich devours its objects in order to sustain its mortal existence;its waters devour not but they do not fail; they are the eternaltruth robed in a transparent veil of mental forms; therefore, it issaid, they are neither clothed nor naked (v. 6).

But this is not the last stage. The Force rises into the wombor birthplace of this mental clarity (ghr.tasya) where the watersflow as streams of the divine sweetness (sravathe madhunam);there the forms it assumes are universal forms, masses of thevast and infinite consciousness. As a result, the fostering riversin the lower world are nourished by this descending highersweetness and the mental and physical consciousness, the twofirst mothers of the all-effecting Will, become in their entirelargeness perfectly equal and harmonised by this light of theTruth, through this nourishing by the infinite Bliss. They bearthe full force of Agni, the blaze of his lightnings, the glory andrapture of his universal forms. For where the Lord, the Male, theBull of the abundance is increased by the wisdom of the super-conscient Truth, there always flow the streams of the clarity andthe streams of the bliss (vs. 7-8).

The Father of all things is the Lord and Male; he is hidden inthe secret source of things, in the super-conscient; Agni, with hiscompanion gods and with the sevenfold Waters, enters into thesuper-conscient without therefore disappearing from our con-scient existence, finds the source of the honeyed plenty of theFather of things and pours them out on our life. He bears andhimself becomes the Son, the pure Kumara, the pure Male, theOne, the soul in man revealed in its universality; the mental andphysical consciousness in the human being accept him as their


lord and lover; but, though one, he still enjoys the manifoldmovement of the rivers, the multiple cosmic energies (vs. 9-10).

Then we are told expressly that this infinite into which hehas entered and in which he grows, in which the many Watersvictoriously reaching their goal (yasasah. ) increase him, is theunobstructed vast where the Truth is born, the shoreless infinite,his own natural seat in which he now takes up his home. Therethe seven rivers, the sisters, work no longer separated thoughof one origin as on the earth and in the mortal life, but ratheras indivisible companions (jamınam apasi svasr.n. am). In thatentire meeting of these great ones Agni moves in all things andupbears all things; the rays of his vision are perfectly straight,no longer affected by the lower crookedness; he from whomthe radiances of knowledge, the brilliant herds, were born, nowgives them this high and supreme birth; he turns them into thedivine knowledge, the immortal consciousness (vs. 11-12).

This also is his own new and last birth. He who was born asthe Son of Force from the growths of earth, he who was born asthe child of the Waters, is now born in many forms to the goddessof bliss, she who has the entire felicity, that is to say to the divineconscious beatitude, in the shoreless infinite. The gods or divinepowers in man using the mind as an instrument reach him there,unite around him, set him to the great work of the world inthis new, mighty and effective birth. They, the outshinings ofthat vast consciousness, cleave to this divine Force as its brightlightnings and from him in the super-conscient, the shorelessvast, his own home, they draw for man the Immortality.

Such then, profound, coherent, luminous behind the veilof figures is the sense of the Vedic symbol of the seven rivers,of the Waters, of the five worlds, of the birth and ascent ofAgni which is also the upward journey of man and the Godswhose image man forms in himself from level to level of thegreat hill of being (sanoh. sanum). Once we apply it and seizethe true sense of the symbol of the Cow and the symbol of theSoma with a just conception of the psychological functions ofthe Gods, all the apparent incoherences and obscurities and far-fetched chaotic confusion of these ancient hymns disappears in a


moment. Simply, easily, without straining there disengages itselfthe profound and luminous doctrine of the ancient Mystics, thesecret of the Veda.

Chapter XII

The Herds of the Dawn

THE SEVEN Rivers of the Veda, the Waters, apah. , are usu-ally designated in the figured Vedic language as the sevenMothers or the seven fostering Cows, sapta dhenavah. .

The word apah. itself has, covertly, a double significance; for theroot ap meant originally not only to move from which in allprobability is derived the sense of waters, but to be or bringinto being, as in apatya, a child, and the Southern Indian appa,father. The seven Waters are the waters of being; they are theMothers from whom all forms of existence are born. But wemeet also another expression, sapta gavah. , the seven Cows or theseven Lights, and the epithet saptagu, that which has seven rays.Gu (gavah. ) and go (gavah. ) bear throughout the Vedic hymnsthis double sense of cows and radiances. In the ancient Indiansystem of thought being and consciousness were aspects of eachother, and Aditi, infinite existence from whom the gods are born,described as the Mother with her seven names and seven seats(dhamani), is also conceived as the infinite consciousness, theCow, the primal Light manifest in seven Radiances, sapta gavah. .The sevenfold principle of existence is therefore imaged from theone point of view in the figure of the Rivers that arise from theocean, sapta dhenavah. , from the other in the figure of the Raysof the all-creating Father, Surya Savitri, sapta gavah. .

The image of the Cow is the most important of all the Vedicsymbols. For the ritualist the word go means simply a physicalcow and nothing else, just as its companion word, asva, meanssimply a physical horse and has no other sense, or as ghr.ta meansonly water or clarified butter, vıra only a son or a retainer orservant. When the Rishi prays to the Dawn, gomad vıravaddhehi ratnam us.o asvavat, the ritualistic commentator sees inthe invocation only an entreaty for “pleasant wealth to whichare attached cows, men (or sons) and horses”. If on the other


hand these words are symbolic, the sense will run, “Confirm inus a state of bliss full of light, of conquering energy and of forceof vitality.” It is therefore necessary to decide once for all thesignificance of the word go in the Vedic hymns. If it proves tobe symbolic, then these other words, — asva, horse, vıra, manor hero, apatya or praja, offspring, hiran. ya, gold, vaja, plenty(food, according to Sayana), — by which it is continually ac-companied, must perforce assume also a symbolic and a kindredsignificance.

The image of the Cow is constantly associated in Veda withthe Dawn and the Sun; it also recurs in the legend of the recoveryof the lost cows from the cave of the Panis by Indra and Brihas-pati with the aid of the hound Sarama and the Angiras Rishis.The conception of the Dawn and the legend of the Angirases areat the very heart of the Vedic cult and may almost be consideredas the key to the secret of the significance of Veda. It is thereforethese two that we must examine in order to find firm ground forour inquiry.

Now even the most superficial examination of the Vedichymns to the Dawn makes it perfectly clear that the cows of theDawn, the cows of the Sun are a symbol for Light and cannotbe anything else. Sayana himself is obliged in these hymns tointerpret the word sometimes as cows, sometimes as rays, —careless as usual of consistency; sometimes he will even tell usthat go like r.tam, the word for truth, means water. As a matter offact it is evident that we are meant to take the word in a doublesense, “light” as the true significance, “cow” as the concreteimage and verbal figure.

The sense of “rays” is quite indisputable in such passages asthe third verse of Madhuchchhandas’ hymn to Indra, I.7, “Indrafor far vision made the Sun to ascend in heaven: he sped him allover the hill by his rays,” vi gobhir adrim airayat.1 But at thesame time, the rays of Surya are the herds of the Sun, the kine

1 We may also translate “He sent abroad the thunderbolt with its lights”; but this doesnot make as good and coherent a sense; even if we take it, gobhir must mean “radiances”not “cows”.

The Herds of the Dawn 125

of Helios slain by the companions of Odysseus in the Odyssey,stolen by Hermes from his brother Apollo in the Homeric hymnto Hermes. They are the cows concealed by the enemy Vala, bythe Panis; when Madhuchchhandas says to Indra, “Thou didstuncover the hole of Vala of the Cows”, he means that Vala isthe concealer, the withholder of the Light and it is the concealedLight that Indra restores to the sacrificer. The recovery of thelost or stolen cows is constantly spoken of in the Vedic hymnsand its sense will be clear enough when we come to examine thelegend of the Panis and of the Angirases.

Once this sense is established, the material explanation ofthe Vedic prayer for “cows” is at once shaken; for if the lostcows for whose restoration the Rishis invoke Indra, are notphysical herds stolen by the Dravidians but the shining herds ofthe Sun, of the Light, then we are justified in considering whetherthe same figure does not apply when there is the simple prayerfor “cows” without any reference to any hostile interception.For instance in I.4.2 it is said of Indra, the maker of perfectforms who is as a good milker in the milking of the cows, thathis ecstasy of the Soma-Wine is verily “cow-giving”, goda idrevato madah. . It is the height of absurdity and irrationality tounderstand by this phrase that Indra is a very wealthy god and,when he gets drunk, exceedingly liberal in the matter of cow-giving. It is obvious that as the cow-milking in the first verse isa figure, so the cow-giving in the second verse is a figure. And ifwe know from other passages of the Veda that the Cow is thesymbol of Light, we must understand here also that Indra, whenfull of the Soma-ecstasy, is sure to give us the Light.

In the hymns to the Dawn the symbolic sense of the cowsof light is equally clear. Dawn is described always as gomatı,which must mean, obviously, luminous or radiant; for it wouldbe nonsense to use “cowful” in a literal sense as the fixed epithetof the Dawn. But the image of the cows is there in the epithet;for Usha is not only gomatı, she is gomatı asvavatı; she hasalways with her her cows and her horses. She creates light forall the world and opens out the darkness as the pen of the Cow,where we have without any possibility of mistake the cow as the


symbol of light, (I.92.4). We may note also that in this hymnI.92, the Ashwins are asked to drive downward their chariot ona path that is radiant and golden, gomad hiran. yavad. MoreoverDawn is said to be drawn in her chariot sometimes by ruddycows, sometimes by ruddy horses. “She yokes her host of theruddy cows”; yunkte gavam arun. anam anıkam (I.124.11), —where the second meaning “her host of the ruddy rays” standsclear behind the concrete image. She is described as the mother ofthe cows or radiances; gavam janitrı akr.ta pra ketum (I.124.5),“the Mother of the cows (radiances) has created vision”, andit is said elsewhere of her action, “vision” or “perception hasdawned now where nought was”; and again it is clear that thecows are the shining herds of the Light. She is also praised as “theleader of the shining herds”, netrı gavam, VII.76.6; and thereis an illuminating verse in which the two ideas are combined,“the Mother of the Herds, the guide of the days”, gavam matanetrı ahnam (VII.77.2). Finally, as if to remove the veil of theimage entirely, the Veda itself tells us that the herds are a figurefor the rays of the Light, “her happy rays come into sight likecows released into movement” — prati bhadra adr.ks.ata gavamsarga na rasmayah. (IV.52.5). And we have the still more con-clusive verse, VII.79.2, “Thy cows (rays) remove the darknessand extend the Light”; sam te gavas tama a vartayanti, jyotiryacchanti.2

But Dawn is not only drawn by these shining herds; shebrings them as a gift to the sacrificer; she is, like Indra in hisSoma-ecstasy, a giver of the Light. In a hymn of Vasishtha(VII.75) she is described as sharing in the action of the godsby which the strong places where the herds are concealed arebroken open and they are given to men; “True with the godswho are true, great with the gods who are great, she breaks openthe strong places and gives of the shining herds; the cows lowtowards the dawn,” — rujad dr.d. hani dadad usriyan. am, prati

2 It cannot of course be disputed that go means light in the Veda e.g. when it is saidthat Vritra is slain gava, by light, there is no question of the cow; the question is of theuse of the double sense and of the cow as a symbol.


gava us.asam vavasanta. And in the very next verse she is askedto confirm or establish for the sacrificers gomad ratnam asvavatpurubhojah. , a state of bliss full of the light (cows), of the horses(vital force) and of many enjoyments. The herds which Ushagives are therefore the shining troops of the Light recovered bythe gods and the Angiras Rishis from the strong places of Valaand the Panis and the wealth of cows (and horses) for which theRishis constantly pray can be no other than a wealth of this sameLight; for it is impossible to suppose that the cows which Ushais said to give in the seventh verse of the hymn are different fromthe cows which are prayed for in the eighth, — that the wordin the former verse means light and in the next physical cowsand that the Rishi has forgotten the image he was using the verymoment it has fallen from his tongue.

Sometimes the prayer is not for luminous delight or lumi-nous plenitude, but for a luminous impulsion or force; “Bringto us, O daughter of Heaven, luminous impulsions along withthe rays of the Sun,” gomatır is.a a vaha duhitar divah. , sakamsuryasya rasmibhih. , V.79.8. Sayana explains that this means“shining foods”, but it is obviously nonsense to talk of radiantfoods being brought by Dawn with the rays of the Sun. If is.means food, then we have to understand by the phrase “foodof cow’s flesh”, but, although the eating of cow’s flesh was notforbidden in the early times, as is apparent from the Brahmanas,still that this sense which Sayana avoids as shocking to the laterHindu sentiment, is not intended — it would be quite as absurdas the other, — is proved by another verse of the Rig Veda inwhich the Ashwins are invoked to give the luminous impulsionthat carries us through to the other side of the darkness, ya nah.pıparad asvina jyotis.matı tamas tirah. , tam asme rasatham is.am(I.46.6).

We can perceive from these typical examples how pervadingis this image of the Cow of Light and how inevitably it points to apsychological sense for the Veda. A doubt, however, intervenes.Why should we not, even accepting this inevitable conclusionthat the cow is an image for Light, understand it to mean simplythe light of day as the language of the Veda seems to intend?


Why suppose a symbol where there is only an image? Why invitethe difficulty of a double figure in which “cow” means light ofdawn and light of dawn is the symbol of an inner illumination?Why not take it that the Rishis were praying not for spiritualillumination, but for daylight?

The objections are manifold and some of them overwhelm-ing. If we assume that the Vedic hymns were composed in Indiaand the dawn is the Indian dawn and the night the brief Indiannight of ten or twelve hours, we have to start with the concessionthat the Vedic Rishis were savages overpowered by a terror ofthe darkness which they peopled with goblins, ignorant of thenatural law of the succession of night and day — which is yetbeautifully hymned in many of the Suktas, — and believed thatit was only by their prayers and sacrifices that the Sun rose in theheavens and the Dawn emerged from the embrace of her sisterNight. Yet they speak of the undeviating rule of the action ofthe Gods, and of Dawn following always the path of the eternalLaw or Truth! We have to suppose that when the Rishi givesvent to the joyous cry “We have crossed over to the other shoreof this darkness!”, it was only the normal awakening to thedaily sunrise that he thus eagerly hymned. We have to supposethat the Vedic peoples sat down to the sacrifice at dawn andprayed for the light when it had already come. And if we acceptall these improbabilities, we are met by the clear statement thatit was only after they had sat for nine or for ten months thatthe lost light and the lost sun were recovered by the AngirasRishis. And what are we to make of the constant assertionof the discovery of the Light by the Fathers; — “Our fathersfound out the hidden light, by the truth in their thoughts theybrought to birth the Dawn,” gud. ham jyotih. pitaro anvavindan,satyamantra ajanayan us.asam (VII.76.4). If we found such averse in any collection of poems in any literature, we would atonce give it a psychological or a spiritual sense; there is no justreason for a different treatment of the Veda.

If, however, we are to give a naturalistic explanation andno other to the Vedic hymns, it is quite clear that the VedicDawn and Night cannot be the Night and Dawn of India; it


is only in the Arctic regions that the attitude of the Rishis to-wards these natural circumstances and the statements about theAngirases become at all intelligible. But though it is extremelyprobable that the memories of the Arctic home enter into theexternal sense of the Veda, the Arctic theory does not excludean inner sense behind the ancient images drawn from Naturenor does it dispense with the necessity for a more coherent andstraightforward explanation of the hymns to the Dawn.

We have, for instance, the hymn of Praskanwa Kanwa tothe Ashwins (I.46) in which there is the reference to the lumi-nous impulsion that carries us through to the other shore of thedarkness. This hymn is intimately connected with the Vedic ideaof the Dawn and the Night. It contains references to many ofthe fixed Vedic images, to the path of the Truth, the crossingof the rivers, the rising of the Sun, the connection between theDawn and the Ashwins, the mystic effect and oceanic essence ofthe Soma Wine.

“Lo, the Dawn than which there is none higher, opens outfull of delight in the Heavens; O Ashwins, the Vast of you Iaffirm, ye of whom the Ocean is the mother, accomplishers ofthe work who pass beyond through the mind to the felicitiesand, divine, find that substance by the thought. . . . O Lordsof the Voyage, who mentalise the word, this is the dissolverof your thinkings, — drink ye of the Soma violently; give to usthat impulsion, O Ashwins which, luminous, carries us throughbeyond the darkness. Travel for us in your ship to reach the othershore beyond the thoughts of the mind. Yoke, O Ashwins, yourcar, — your car that becomes the vast oared ship in Heaven, inthe crossing of its rivers. By the thought the powers of Delighthave been yoked. The Soma-powers of delight in heaven are thatsubstance in the place of the Waters. But where shall you castaside the veil you have made to conceal you? Nay, Light hasbeen born for the joy of the Soma; — the Sun that was dark hasshot out its tongue towards the Gold. The path of the Truth hascome into being by which we shall travel to that other shore;seen is all the wide way through Heaven. The seeker grows inhis being towards increasing manifestation after manifestation


of the Ashwins when they find satisfaction in the ecstasy of theSoma. Do ye, dwelling (or, shining) in the all-luminous Sun, bythe drinking of the Soma, by the Word come as creators of thebliss into our humanity. Dawn comes to us according to yourglory when you pervade all our worlds and you win the Truthsout of the Nights. Both together drink, O Ashwins, both togetherextend to us the peace by expandings whose wholeness remainsuntorn.”

This is the straightforward and natural sense of the hymnand its intention is not difficult to follow if we remember themain ideas and images of the Vedic doctrine. The Night is clearlythe image of an inner darkness; by the coming of the Dawn theTruths are won out of the Nights. This is the rising of the Sunwhich was lost in the obscurity — the familiar figure of the lostsun recovered by the Gods and the Angiras Rishis — the sunof Truth, and it now shoots out its tongue of fire towards thegolden Light: — for hiran. ya, gold is the concrete symbol of thehigher light, the gold of the Truth, and it is this treasure notgolden coin for which the Vedic Rishis pray to the Gods. Thisgreat change from the inner obscuration to the illumination iseffected by the Ashwins, lords of the joyous upward action ofthe mind and the vital powers, through the immortal wine ofthe Ananda poured into mind and body and there drunk bythem. They mentalise the expressive Word, they lead us intothe heaven of pure mind beyond this darkness and there by theThought they set the powers of the Delight to work. But evenover the heavenly waters they cross, for the power of the Somahelps them to dissolve all mental constructions, and they castaside even this veil; they go beyond Mind and the last attainingis described as the crossing of the rivers, the passage through theheaven of the pure mind, the journey by the path of the Truthto the other side. Not till we reach the highest supreme, paramaparavat, do we rest at last from the great human journey.

We shall see that not only in this hymn, but everywhereDawn comes as a bringer of the Truth, is herself the outshiningof the Truth. She is the divine Dawn and the physical dawningis only her shadow and symbol in the material universe.

Chapter XIII

Dawn and the Truth

USHA IS described repeatedly as the Mother of the Cows.If then the cow is a Vedic symbol for the physical lightor for spiritual illumination the phrase must either bear

this sense that she is the mother or source of the physical rays ofthe daylight or else that she creates the radiances of the supremeDay, the splendour and clarity of the inner illumination. But wesee in the Veda that Aditi, the Mother of the Gods, is describedboth as the Cow and as the general Mother; she is the SupremeLight and all radiances proceed from her. Psychologically, Aditiis the supreme or infinite Consciousness, mother of the gods, inopposition to Danu or Diti,1 the divided consciousness, motherof Vritra and the other Danavas — enemies of the gods and ofman in his progress. In a more general aspect she is the source ofall the cosmic forms of consciousness from the physical upwards;the seven cows, sapta gavah. , are her forms and there are, we aretold, seven names and seven seats of the Mother. Usha as themother of the cows can only be a form or power of this supremeLight, of this supreme Consciousness, of Aditi. And in fact,we do find her so described in I.113.19, mata devanam aditeranıkam, “Mother of the gods, form (or, power) of Aditi.”

But the illumining dawn of the higher or undivided Con-sciousness is always the dawn of the Truth; if Usha is that illu-mining dawn, then we are bound to find her advent frequentlyassociated in the verses of the Rig Veda with the idea of theTruth, the Ritam. And such association we do repeatedly find.For, first of all, Usha is described as “following effectively thepath of the Truth,” r.tasya pantham anveti sadhu. Here neitherthe ritualistic nor the naturalistic sense suggested for r.tam can at

1 Not that the word Aditi is etymologically the privative of Diti; the two words derivefrom entirely different roots, ad and di.


all apply; there would be no meaning in a constant affirmationthat Dawn follows the path of the sacrifice or follows the pathof the water. We can only escape from the obvious significanceif we choose to understand by pantha r.tasya the path, not of theTruth, but of the Sun. But the Veda describes rather the Sun asfollowing the path of Usha and this would be the natural imagesuggested to an observer of the physical Dawn. Moreover, evenif the phrase did not clearly in other passages mean the pathof the Truth, the psychological significance would still inter-vene; for the sense would then be that the dawn of illuminationfollows the path of the True or the Lord of the Truth, SuryaSavitri.

We have precisely the same idea repeated but with stillclearer and fuller psychological indications in I.124.3; r.tasyapantham anveti sadhu, prajanatıva na diso minati: “She movesaccording to the path of the Truth and, as one that knows, shelimits not the regions.” Disah. , we may note, has a double sense;but it is not necessary to insist upon it here. Dawn adheres tothe path of the Truth and because she has this knowledge orperception she does not limit the infinity, the br.hat, of whichshe is the illumination. That this is the true sense of the verse isproved beyond dispute, expressly, unmistakably, by a Rik of thefifth Mandala (V.80.1) which describes Usha dyutad-yamanambr.hatım r.tena r.tavarım svar avahantım, “of a luminous move-ment, vast with the Truth, supreme in (or possessed of) the Truth,bringing with her Swar.” We have the idea of the Vast, the ideaof the Truth, the idea of the solar light of the world of Swar;and certainly all these notions are thus intimately and insis-tently associated with no mere physical Dawn! We may compareVII.75.1, vyus.a avo divija r.tena, avis.kr.n. vana mahimanam agat;“Dawn born in heaven opens out things by the Truth, she comesmanifesting the greatness.” Again we have Dawn revealing allthings by the power of the Truth and the result described as themanifestation of a certain Vastness.

Finally we have the same idea described, but with the useof another word for Truth, satya which does not, like r.tam,lend itself to any ambiguity, satya satyebhir mahatı mahadbhir

Dawn and the Truth 133

devı devebhir (VII.75.7), “Dawn true in her being with the godswho are true, vast with the Gods who are vast.” This “truth”of the Dawn is much insisted upon by Vamadeva in one of hishymns, IV.51; for there not only does he speak of the Dawns“encompassing the worlds immediately with horses yoked bythe Truth,” r.tayugbhir asvaih. (cf. VI.65.2) but he speaks ofthem as bhadra r.tajatasatyah. , “happy, and true because bornfrom the Truth”; and in another verse he describes them as “thegoddesses who awake from the seat of the Truth.”

This close connection of bhadra and r.ta reminds us of thesame connection of ideas in Madhuchchhandas’ Hymn to Agni.In our psychological interpretation of the Veda we are met atevery turn by the ancient conception of the Truth as the path tothe Bliss. Usha, the dawn of the illumination of the Truth, mustnecessarily bring also the joy and the beatitude. This idea of theDawn as the bringer of delight we find constantly in the Vedaand Vasishtha gives a very positive expression to it in VII.81.3,ya vahasi puru sparham ratnam na dasus.e mayah. , “thou whobearest to the giver the beatitude as a manifold and desirableecstasy.”

A common Vedic word is the word sunr.ta which Sayana in-terprets as “pleasant and true speech”; but it seems to have oftenthe more general sense of “happy truths”. Dawn is sometimesdescribed as r.tavarı, full of the Truth, sometimes as sunr.tavarı.She comes uttering her true and happy words, sunr.ta ırayantı.As she has been described as the leader of the radiant herdsand the leader of the days, so she is described as the luminousleader of happy truths, bhasvatı netrı sunr.tanam (I.92.7). Andthis close connection in the mind of the Vedic Rishis betweenthe idea of light, of the rays or cows, and the idea of the truth iseven more unmistakable in another Rik, I.92.14, gomati asvavativibhavari . . . sunr.tavati, “Dawn with thy shining herds, withthy steeds, widely luminous, full of happy truths.” A similar butyet more open phrase in I.48.2 points the significance of thiscollocation of epithets, asvavatır gomatır visvasuvidah. , “Dawnswith their swiftnesses (horses), their radiances (herds), rightlyknowing all things.”


These are by no means all the indications of the psycholog-ical character of the Vedic Dawn that we find in the Rig Veda.Dawn is constantly represented as awakening to vision, percep-tion, right movement. “The goddess,” says Gotama Rahugana,“fronts and looks upon all the worlds, the eye of vision shineswith an utter wideness; awakening all life for movement shediscovers speech for all that thinks,” visvasya vacam avidanmanayoh. (I.92.9). We have here a Dawn that releases life andmind into their fullest wideness and we ignore the whole forceof the words and phrases chosen by the Rishi if we limit thesuggestion to a mere picture of the reawakening of earthly lifein the physical dawning. And even if here the word used forthe vision brought by the Dawn, caks.uh. , is capable of indicat-ing only physical sight, yet in other passages it is ketuh. whichmeans perception, a perceptive vision in the mental conscious-ness, a faculty of knowledge. Usha is pracetah. , she who has thisperceptive knowledge. Mother of the radiances, she has createdthis perceptive vision of the mind; gavam janitrı akr.ta pra ketum(I.124.5). She is herself that vision, — “Now perceptive visionhas broken out into its wide dawn where nought was before,”vi nunam ucchad asati pra ketuh. (I.124.11). She is by her per-ceptive power possessed of the happy truths, cikitvit-sunr.tavarı(IV.52.4).

This perception, this vision is, we are told, that of theImmortality, amr.tasya ketuh. (III.61.3); it is the light, in otherwords, of the Truth and the Bliss which constitute the higheror immortal consciousness. Night in the Veda is the symbolof our obscure consciousness full of ignorance in knowledgeand of stumblings in will and act, therefore of all evil, sin andsuffering; light is the coming of the illuminated higher conscious-ness which leads to truth and happiness. We find constantly theopposition of the two words duritam and suvitam. Duritammeans literally stumbling or wrong going, figuratively all that iswrong and evil, all sin, error, calamity; suvitam means literallyright or good going and expresses all that is good and happy, itmeans especially the felicity that comes by following the rightpath. Thus Vasishtha says of the goddess (VII.78.2), “Dawn


comes divine repelling by the Light all darknesses and evils,”visva tamamsi durita; and in a number of verses the goddess isdescribed as awakening, impelling or leading men to right going,to the happiness, suvitaya.

Therefore she is the leader not only of happy truths, butof our spiritual wealth and joy, bringer of the felicity whichis reached by man or brought to him by the Truth, es.a netrıradhasah. sunr.tanam (VII.76.7). This wealth for which the Rishispray is described under the figure of material riches; it is gomadasvavad vıravad or it is gomad asvavad rathavac ca radhah. . Go,the cow, asva, the horse, praja or apatya, the offspring, nr. orvıra, the man or hero, hiran. ya, gold, ratha, the chariot, sravas, —food or fame, according to the ritualist interpretation, — theseare the constituents of the wealth desired by the Vedic sages.Nothing, it would seem, could be more matter-of-fact, earthy,material; these are indeed the blessings for which a race of lustybarbarians full of vigorous appetite, avid of earth’s goods wouldpray to their primitive gods. But we have seen that hiran. ya isused in another sense than that of earthly gold. We have seenthat the “cows” return constantly in connection with the Dawnas a figure for the Light and we have seen that this light isconnected with mental vision and with the truth that brings thebliss. And asva, the horse, is always in these concrete imagesof psychological suggestions coupled with the symbolic figureof the cow: Dawn is gomatı asvavatı. Vasishtha has a verse(VII.77.3) in which the symbolic sense of the Vedic Horse comesout with great power and clearness, —

Devanam caks.uh. subhaga vahantı,svetam nayantı sudr.sıkam asvam;

Us.a adarsi rasmibhir vyakta,citramagha visvam anu prabhuta.

“Happy, bringing the gods’ eye of vision, leading the whiteHorse that has perfect sight, Dawn is seen expressed entirelyby the rays, full of her varied riches, manifesting her birth inall things.” It is clear enough that the white horse (a phraseapplied to the god Agni who is the Seer-Will, kavikratu, the


perfectly-seeing force of divine will in its works, V.1.4) is entirelysymbolical2 and that the “varied riches” she brings with her arealso a figure and certainly do not mean physical wealth.

Dawn is described as gomatı asvavatı vıravatı; and since theepithets gomatı and asvavatı applied to her are symbolical andmean not “cowful and horsed”, but radiant with illuminationsof knowledge and accompanied by the swiftnesses of force, sovıravatı cannot mean “man-accompanied” or accompanied byheroes or servants or sons, but rather signifies that she is attendedby conquering energies or at any rate is used in some kindredand symbolic sense. This becomes quite evident in I.113.18, yagomatır us.asah. sarvavırah. . . . ta asvada asnavat somasutva. Itdoes not mean “the Dawns that have cows and all men or allservants, those a man, having offered the Soma, enjoys as horse-givers.” The Dawn is the inner dawn which brings to man all thevaried fullnesses of his widest being, force, consciousness, joy; itis radiant with its illuminations, it is accompanied by all possiblepowers and energies, it gives man the full force of vitality so thathe can enjoy the infinite delight of that vaster existence.

We can no longer take gomad asvavad vıravad radhah. ina physical sense; the very language of the Veda points us toquite another truth. Therefore the other circumstances of thisgod-given wealth must be taken equally in a spiritual signifi-cance; the offspring, gold, chariots are symbolical; sravas is notfame or food, but bears its psychological sense and means thehigher knowledge which comes not to the senses or the intellect,but to the divine hearing and the divine vision of the Truth;radho dırghasruttamam, rayim sravasyum is that rich state ofbeing, that spiritually opulent felicity which turns towards theknowledge (sravasyu) and has a far-extended hearing for thevibrations of the Word that comes to us from the regions (disah. )of the Infinite. Thus the luminous figure of the Dawn liberates

2 The symbolism of the horse is quite evident in the hymns of Dirghatamas to theHorse of the Sacrifice, the hymns of various Rishis to the Horse Dadhikravan and againin the opening of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in which “Dawn is the head of theHorse” is the first phrase of a very elaborate figure.


us from the material, ritual, ignorant misunderstanding of theVeda which would lead us stumbling from pitfall to pitfall in avery night of chaos and obscurity; it opens to us the closed doorand admits to the heart of the Vedic knowledge.

Chapter XIV

The Cow and the Angiras Legend

WE MUST now pursue this image of the Cow which weare using as a key to the sense of the Veda, into thestriking Vedic parable or legend of the Angiras Rishis,

on the whole the most important of all the Vedic myths.The Vedic hymns, whatever else they may be, are through-

out an invocation to certain “Aryan” gods, friends and helpersof man, for ends which are held by the singers, — or seers, asthey call themselves (kavi, r.s.i, vipra), — to be supremely desir-able (vara, vara). These desirable ends, these boons of the godsare summed up in the words rayi, radhas, which may meanphysically wealth or prosperity, and psychologically a felicityor enjoyment which consists in the abundance of certain formsof spiritual wealth. Man contributes as his share of the jointeffort the work of the sacrifice, the Word, the Soma Wine andthe ghr.ta or clarified butter. The Gods are born in the sacrifice,they increase by the Word, the Wine and the Ghrita and in thatstrength and in the ecstasy and intoxication of the Wine theyaccomplish the aims of the sacrificer. The chief elements of thewealth thus acquired are the Cow and the Horse; but there arealso others, hiran. ya, gold, vıra, men or heroes, ratha, chariots,praja or apatya, offspring. The very means of the sacrifice, thefire, the Soma, the ghr.ta, are supplied by the Gods and theyattend the sacrifice as its priests, purifiers, upholders, heroes ofits warfare, — for there are those who hate the sacrifice andthe Word, attack the sacrificer and tear or withhold from himthe coveted wealth. The chief conditions of the prosperity soardently desired are the rising of the Dawn and the Sun andthe downpour of the rain of heaven and of the seven rivers,— physical or mystic, — called in the Veda the Mighty Ones ofheaven. But even this prosperity, this fullness of cows, horses,gold, men, chariots, offspring, is not a final end in itself; all

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this is a means towards the opening up of the other worlds, thewinning of Swar, the ascent to the solar heavens, the attainmentby the path of the Truth to the Light and to the heavenly Blisswhere the mortal arrives at Immortality.

Such is the undoubted substance of the Veda. The ritualand mythological sense which has been given to it from veryancient times is well known and need not be particularised; insum, it is the performance of sacrificial worship as the chiefduty of man with a view to the enjoyment of wealth here andheaven hereafter. We know also the modern view of the matter inwhich the Veda is a worship of the personified sun, moon, stars,dawn, wind, rain, fire, sky, rivers and other deities of Nature, thepropitiation of these gods by sacrifice, the winning and holdingof wealth in this life, chiefly from human and Dravidian ene-mies and against hostile demons and mortal plunderers, andafter death man’s attainment to the Paradise of the gods. Wenow find, that however valid these ideas may have been forthe vulgar, they were not the inner sense of the Veda to theseers, the illumined minds (kavi, vipra) of the Vedic age. Forthem these material objects were symbols of the immaterial; thecows were the radiances or illuminations of a divine Dawn, thehorses and chariots were symbols of force and movement, goldwas light, the shining wealth of a divine Sun — the true light,r.tam jyotih. ; both the wealth acquired by the sacrifice and thesacrifice itself in all their details symbolised man’s effort and hismeans towards a greater end, the acquisition of immortality. Theaspiration of the Vedic seer was the enrichment and expansionof man’s being, the birth and the formation of the godheads inhis life-sacrifice, the increase of the Force, Truth, Light, Joy ofwhich they are the powers until through the enlarged and ever-opening worlds of his being the soul of man rises, sees the divinedoors (devır dvarah. ) swing open to his call and enters into thesupreme felicity of a divine existence beyond heaven and earth.This ascent is the parable of the Angiras Rishis.

All the gods are conquerors and givers of the Cow, the Horseand the divine riches, but it is especially the great deity Indrawho is the hero and fighter in this warfare and who wins for man


the Light and the Force. Therefore Indra is constantly addressedas the Master of the herds, gopati; he is even imaged as himselfthe cow and the horse; he is the good milker whom the Rishiwishes to milk and what he yields are perfect forms and ultimatethoughts; he is Vrishabha, the Bull of the herds; his is the wealthof cows and horses which man covets. It is even said in VI.28.5,“O people, these that are the cows, they are Indra; it is Indra Idesire with my heart and with my mind.” This identification ofthe cows and Indra is important and we shall have to return toit, when we deal with Madhuchchhandas’ hymns to that deity.

But ordinarily the Rishis image the acquisition of this wealthas a conquest effected against certain powers, the Dasyus, some-times represented as possessing the coveted riches which have tobe ravished from them by violence, sometimes as stealing themfrom the Aryan who has then to discover and recover the lostwealth by the aid of the gods. The Dasyus who withhold or stealthe cows are called the Panis, a word which seems originally tohave meant doers, dealers or traffickers; but this significance issometimes coloured by its further sense of “misers”. Their chiefis Vala, a demon whose name signifies probably the circum-scriber or “encloser”, as Vritra means the opponent, obstructeror enfolding coverer. It is easy to suggest, as do the scholars whowould read as much primitive history as possible into the Veda,that the Panis are the Dravidians and Vala is their chief or god.But this sense can only be upheld in isolated passages; in manyhymns it is incompatible with the actual words of the Rishis andturns into a jumble of gaudy nonsense their images and figures.We have seen something of this incompatibility already; it willbecome clearer to us as we examine more closely the mythus ofthe lost cows.

Vala dwells in a lair, a hole (bila) in the mountains; Indraand the Angiras Rishis have to pursue him there and force him togive up his wealth; for he is Vala of the cows, valam gomantam.The Panis also are represented as concealing the stolen herds ina cave of the mountain which is called their concealing prison,vavra, or the pen of the cows, vraja, or sometimes in a signifi-cant phrase, gavyam urvam, literally the cowey wideness or in


the other sense of go “the luminous wideness”, the vast wealthof the shining herds. To recover this lost wealth the sacrificehas to be performed; the Angirases or else Brihaspati and theAngirases have to chant the true word, the mantra; Sarama theheavenly hound has to find out the cows in the cave of thePanis; Indra strong with the Soma wine and the Angirases, theseers, his companions, have to follow the track, enter the caveor violently break open the strong places of the hill, defeat thePanis and drive upward the delivered herds.

Let us, first, take note of certain features which ought not tobe overlooked when we seek to determine the interpretation ofthis parable or this myth. In the first place the legend, howeverprecise in its images, is not yet in the Veda a simple mythologicaltradition, but is used with a certain freedom and fluidity whichbetrays the significant image behind the sacred tradition. Often itis stripped of the mythological aspect and applied to the personalneed or aspiration of the singer. For it is an action of which Indrais always capable; although he has done it once for all in the typeby means of the Angirases, yet he repeats the type continuallyeven in the present, he is constantly the seeker of the cows,gaves.an. a, and the restorer of the stolen wealth.

Sometimes we have simply the fact of the stolen cows andthe recovery by Indra without any reference to Sarama or theAngirases or the Panis. But it is not always Indra who recoversthe herds. We have for instance a hymn to Agni, the secondof the fifth Mandala, a hymn of the Atris, in which the singerapplies the image of the stolen cows to himself in a languagewhich clearly betrays its symbolism. Agni, long repressed inher womb by mother Earth who is unwilling to give him tothe father Heaven, held and concealed in her so long as she iscompressed into limited form (pes.ı), at length comes to birthwhen she becomes great and vast (mahis.ı). The birth of Agni isassociated with a manifestation or vision of luminous herds. “Ibeheld afar in a field one shaping his weapons who was golden-tusked and pure-bright of hue; I give to him the Amrita (theimmortal essence, Soma) in separate parts; what shall they doto me who have not Indra and have not the word? I beheld


in the field as it were a happy herd ranging continuously, many,shining; they seized them not, for he was born; even those (cows)that were old, become young again.” But if these Dasyus whohave not Indra, nor the word, are at present powerless to seizeon the luminous herds, it was otherwise before this bright andformidable godhead was born. “Who were they that divorcedmy strength (maryakam; my host of men, my heroes, vıra) fromthe cows? for they (my men) had no warrior and protector ofthe kine. Let those who took them from me, release them; heknows and comes driving to us the cattle.”

What, we may fairly ask, are these shining herds, these cowswho were old and become young again? Certainly, they are notphysical herds, nor is it any earthly field by the Yamuna or theJhelum that is the scene of this splendid vision of the golden-tusked warrior god and the herds of the shining cattle. They arethe herds either of the physical or of the divine Dawn and thelanguage suits ill with the former interpretation; this mysticalvision is surely a figure of the divine illumination. They areradiances that were stolen by the powers of darkness and arenow divinely recovered not by the god of the physical fire, butby the flaming Force which was concealed in the littleness of thematerial existence and is now liberated into the clarities of anillumined mental action.

Indra is not, then, the only god who can break up thetenebrous cave and restore the lost radiances. There are otherdeities to whom various hymns make the attribution of this greatvictory. Usha is one of them, the divine Dawn, mother of theseherds. “True with the gods who are true, great with the gods whoare great, sacrificial godhead with the gods sacrificial, she breaksopen the strong places, she gives of the shining herds; the cowslow towards the Dawn!” (VII.75.7). Agni is another; sometimeshe wars by himself as we have already seen, sometimes alongwith Indra — “Ye two warred over the cows, O Indra, O Agni”(VI.60.2) — or, again, with Soma, — “O Agni and Soma, thatheroic might of yours was made conscient when ye robbed thePani of the cows” (I.93.4). Soma in another passage is associatedin this victory with Indra; “This god born by force stayed, with


Indra as his comrade, the Pani” and performed all the exploits ofthe gods warring against the Dasyus (VI.44.22). The Ashwinsalso are credited with the same achievement in VI.62.11, “Yetwo open the doors of the strong pen full of the kine” andagain in I.112.18, “O Angiras, (the twin Ashwins are sometimesunified in a single appellation), ye two take delight by the mindand enter first in the opening of the stream of the cows,” wherethe sense is evidently the liberated, outflowing stream or sea ofthe Light.

Brihaspati is more frequently the hero of this victory.“Brihaspati, coming first into birth from the great Light inthe supreme ether, seven-mouthed, multiply-born, seven-rayed,dispelled the darknesses; he with his host that possess thestubh and the Rik broke Vala into pieces by his cry. Shout-ing Brihaspati drove upwards the bright herds that speed theoffering and they lowed in reply” (IV.50). And again in VI.73.1and 3, “Brihaspati who is the hill-breaker, the first-born, theAngirasa. . . . Brihaspati conquered the treasures (vasuni), greatpens this god won full of the kine.” The Maruts also, singersof the Rik like Brihaspati, are associated, though less directly inthis divine action. “He whom ye foster, O Maruts, shall breakopen the pen” (VI.66.8), and elsewhere we hear of the cows ofthe Maruts (I.38.2). Pushan, the Increaser, a form of the sun-godis also invoked for the pursuit and recovery of the stolen cattle,(VI.54); “Let Pushan follow after our kine, let him protect ourwar-steeds. . . . Pushan, go thou after the kine. . . . Let him driveback to us that which was lost.” Even Saraswati becomes aslayer of the Panis. And in Madhuchchhandas’ hymn (I.11.5)we have this striking image, “O lord of the thunderbolt, thoudidst uncover the hole of Vala of the cows; the gods, unfearing,entered speeding (or putting forth their force) into thee.”

Is there a definite sense in these variations which will bindthem together into a single coherent idea or is it at random thatthe Rishis invoke now this and now the other deity in the searchand war for their lost cattle? If we will consent to take the ideasof the Veda as a whole instead of bewildering ourselves in theplay of separate detail, we shall find a very simple and sufficient


answer. This matter of the lost herds is only part of a wholesystem of connected symbols and images. They are recovered bythe sacrifice and the fiery god Agni is the flame, the power andthe priest of the sacrifice; — by the Word, and Brihaspati is thefather of the Word, the Maruts its singers or Brahmas, brahman. omarutah. , Saraswati its inspiration; — by the Wine, and Soma isthe god of the Wine and the Ashwins its seekers, finders, givers,drinkers. The herds are the herds of Light and the Light comesby the Dawn and by the Sun of whom Pushan is a form. Finally,Indra is the head of all these gods, lord of the light, king of theluminous heaven called Swar, — he is, we say, the luminous ordivine Mind; into him all the gods enter and take part in his un-veiling of the hidden light. We see therefore that there is a perfectappropriateness in the attribution of one and the same victoryto these different deities and in Madhuchchhandas’ image of thegods entering into Indra for the stroke against Vala. Nothinghas been done at random or in obedience to a confused fluidityof ideas. The Veda is perfect and beautiful in its coherence andits unity.

Moreover, the conquest of the Light is only part of the greataction of the Vedic sacrifice. The gods have to win by it allthe boons (visva varya) which are necessary for the conquest ofimmortality and the emergence of the hidden illuminations isonly one of these. Force, the Horse, is as necessary as Light, theCow; not only must Vala be reached and the light won from hisjealous grasp, but Vritra must be slain and the waters released;the emergence of the shining herds means the rising of the Dawnand the Sun; that again is incomplete without the sacrifice, thefire, the wine. All these things are different members of oneaction, sometimes mentioned separately, sometimes in groups,sometimes together as if in a single action, a grand total con-quest. And the result of their possession is the revelation of thevast Truth and the conquest of Swar, the luminous world, calledfrequently the wide other world, urum u lokam or simply ulokam. We must grasp this unity first if we are to understand theseparate introduction of these symbols in the various passagesof the Rig Veda.


Thus in VI.73 which has already been cited, we find a briefhymn of three verses in which these symbols are briefly puttogether in their unity; it might almost be described as one ofthe mnemonic hymns of the Veda which serve to keep in mind theunity of its sense and its symbolism. “He who is the hill-breaker,first-born, possessed of the truth, Brihaspati, the Angirasa, thegiver of the oblation, pervader of the two worlds, dweller in theheat and light (of the sun), our father, roars aloud as the Bullto the two firmaments. Brihaspati who for man the voyager hasfashioned that other world in the calling of the gods, slaying theVritra-forces breaks open the cities, conquering foes and over-powering unfriends in his battles. Brihaspati conquers for himthe treasures, great pens this god wins full of the kine, seekingthe conquest of the world of Swar, unassailable; Brihaspati slaysthe Foe by the hymns of illumination (arkaih. ).” We see at oncethe unity of this many-sided symbolism.

Another passage more mystic in its language brings in theidea of the dawn and the restoration or new-birth of light inthe sun which are not expressly mentioned in the brief hymnto Brihaspati. It is in the praise of Soma of which the openingphrase has already been cited, VI.44.22; “This god born by forcestayed with Indra as his comrade the Pani; he it was wrested fromhis own unblest father (the divided being) his weapons of warand his forms of knowledge (mayah. ), he it was made the Dawnsglorious in their lord, he it was created in the Sun the Lightwithin, he it was found the triple principle (of immortality) inheaven in its regions of splendour (the three worlds of Swar) andin the tripartite worlds the hidden immortality (this is the givingof the Amrita in separate parts alluded to in the Atris’ hymn toAgni, the threefold offering of the Soma given on the three levels,tris.u sanus.u, body, life and mind); he it was supported widelyheaven and earth, he it was fashioned the car with the sevenrays; he it was held by his force the ripe yield (of the madhu orghr.ta) in the cows, even the fountain of the ten movements.” Itcertainly seems astonishing to me that so many acute and eagerminds should have read such hymns as these without realisingthat they are the sacred poems of symbolists and mystics, not


of Nature-worshipping barbarians or of rude Aryan invaderswarring with the civilised and Vedantic Dravidians.

Let us now pass rapidly through certain other passages inwhich there is a more scattered collocation of these symbols.First, we find that in this image of the cavern-pen in the hill,as elsewhere, the Cow and Horse go together. We have seenPushan called upon to seek for the cows and protect the horses.The two forms of the Aryan’s wealth always at the mercy ofmarauders? But let us see. “So in thy ecstasy of the Soma thoudidst break open, O hero (Indra), the pen of the Cow and theHorse, like a city” (VIII.32.5). “Break open for us the thousandsof the Cow and the Horse” (VIII.34.14). “That which thouholdest, O Indra, the Cow and the Horse and the imperishableenjoyment, confirm that in the sacrificer and not in the Pani; hewho lies in the slumber, doing not the work and seeking not thegods, let him perish by his own impulsions; thereafter confirmperpetually (in us) the wealth that must increase” (VIII.97.2 and3). In another hymn the Panis are said to withhold the wealthof cows and horses. Always they are powers who receive thecoveted wealth but do not use it, preferring to slumber, avoidingthe divine action (vrata), and they are powers who must perishor be conquered before the wealth can be securely possessed bythe sacrificer. And always the Cow and the Horse represent aconcealed and imprisoned wealth which has to be uncoveredand released by a divine puissance.

With the conquest of the shining herds is also associated theconquest or the birth or illumination of the Dawn and the Sun,but this is a point whose significance we shall have to considerin another chapter. And associated with the Herds, the Dawnand the Sun are the Waters; for the slaying of Vritra with therelease of the waters and the defeat of Vala with the release of theherds are two companion and not unconnected myths. In certainpassages even, as in I.32.4, the slaying of Vritra is represented asthe preliminary to the birth of the Sun, the Dawn and Heaven,and in others the opening of the Hill to the flowing of the Waters.For the general connection we may note the following passages:VII.90.4, “The Dawns broke forth perfect in their shining and


unhurt; meditating they (the Angirases) found the wide Light;they who desire opened the wideness of the cows and the watersfor them flowed forth from heaven”; I.72.8, “By right thoughtthe seven Mighty Ones of heaven (the seven rivers) knew thetruth and knew the doors of bliss; Sarama found the strongwideness of the cows and by that the human creature enjoys”;I.100.18, of Indra and the Maruts, “He with his shining com-panions won the field, won the Sun, won the waters”; V.14.4, ofAgni, “Agni, born, shone out slaying the Dasyus, by the Lightthe Darkness; he found the cows, the waters and Swar”; VI.60.2,of Indra and Agni, “Ye two warred over the cows, the waters,Swar, the dawns that were ravished; O Indra, O Agni, thouunitest (to us) the regions, Swar, the brilliant dawns, the watersand the cows”; I.32.12, of Indra, “O hero, thou didst conquerthe cow, thou didst conquer the Soma; thou didst loose forth totheir flowing the seven rivers.”

In the last passage we see Soma coupled with the cowsamong the conquests of Indra. Usually the Soma intoxicationis the strength in which Indra conquers the cows; e.g. III.43.7,the Soma “in the intoxication of which thou didst open up thecowpens”; II.15.8, “He, hymned by the Angirases, broke Valaand hurled apart the strong places of the hill; he severed theirartificial obstructions; these things Indra did in the intoxicationof the Soma.” Sometimes, however, the working is reversed andit is the Light that brings the bliss of the Soma wine or they cometogether as in I.62.5, “Hymned by the Angirases, O achiever ofworks, thou didst open the dawns with (or by) the Sun and with(or by) the cows the Soma.”

Agni is also, like the Soma, an indispensable element ofthe sacrifice and therefore we find Agni too included in theseformulas of association, as in VII.99.4. “Ye made that wideother world for (as the goal of) the sacrifice, bringing into beingthe Sun and the Dawn and Agni,” and we have the same formulain III.31.15 with the addition of the Path and in VII.44.3 withthe addition of the cow.

From these examples it will appear how closely the differentsymbols and parables of the Veda are connected with each other


and we shall therefore miss the true road of interpretation if wetreat the legend of the Angirases and the Panis as an isolatedmythus which we can interpret at our pleasure without carefulregard to its setting in the general thought of the Veda and thelight that that general thought casts upon the figured languagein which the legend is recounted.

Chapter XV

The Lost Sun and the Lost Cows

THE CONQUEST or recovery of the Sun and the Dawnis a frequent subject of allusion in the hymns of the RigVeda. Sometimes it is the finding of Surya, sometimes

the finding or conquest of Swar, the world of Surya. Sayana,indeed, takes the word Swar as a synonym of Surya; but it isperfectly clear from several passages that Swar is the name of aworld or supreme Heaven above the ordinary heaven and earth.Sometimes indeed it is used for the solar light proper both toSurya and to the world which is formed by his illumination.We have seen that the waters which descend from Heaven orwhich are conquered and enjoyed by Indra and the mortals whoare befriended by him, are described as svarvatır apah. . Sayana,taking these apah. for physical waters, was bound to find anothermeaning for svarvatıh. and he declares that it means saran.avatıh. ,moving; but this is obviously a forced sense which the word itselfdoes not suggest and can hardly bear. The thunderbolt of Indrais called the heavenly stone, svaryam asmanam; its light, that isto say, is the light from this world of the solar splendours. Indrahimself is svarpati, the master of Swar, of the luminous world.

Moreover, as we see that the finding and recovery of theCows is usually described as the work of Indra, often with the aidof the Angiras Rishis and by the instrumentality of the mantraand the sacrifice, of Agni and Soma, so also the finding andrecovery of the sun is attributed to the same agencies. Moreoverthe two actions are continually associated together. We have, itseems to me, overwhelming evidence in the Veda itself that allthese things constitute really one great action of which they areparts. The Cows are the hidden rays of the Dawn or of Surya;their rescue out of the darkness leads to or is the sign of theuprising of the sun that was hidden in the darkness; this againis the condition, always with the instrumentality of the sacrifice,


its circumstances and its helping gods, of the conquest of Swar,the supreme world of Light. So much results beyond doubt,it seems to me, from the language of the Veda itself; but alsothat language points to this Sun being a symbol of the divineillumining Power, Swar the world of the divine Truth and theconquest of divine Truth the real aim of the Vedic Rishis and thesubject of their hymns. I will now examine as rapidly as possiblethe evidence which points towards this conclusion.

First of all, we see that Swar and Surya are different con-ceptions in the minds of the Vedic Rishis, but always closelyconnected. We have for instance the verse in Bharadwaja’s hymnto Soma and Indra, VI.72.1, “Ye found the Sun, ye found Swar,ye slew all darkness and limitations” and in a hymn of Vamadevato Indra, IV.16, which celebrates this achievement of Indra andthe Angirases, “When by the hymns of illumination (arkaih. )Swar was found, entirely visible, when they (the Angirases) madeto shine the great light out of the night, he (Indra) made thedarknesses ill-assured (i.e. loosened their firm hold) so that menmight have vision.” In the first passage we see that Swar andSurya are different from each other and that Swar is not merelyanother name for Surya; but at the same time the finding of Swarand the finding of Surya are represented as closely connected andindeed one movement and the result is the slaying of all darknessand limitations. So in the second passage the finding and makingvisible of Swar is associated with the shining of a great light outof the darkness, which we find from parallel passages to be therecovery, by the Angirases, of the Sun that was lying concealedin the darkness. Surya is found by the Angirases through thepower of their hymns or true mantras; Swar also is found andmade visible by the hymns of the Angirases, arkaih. . It is cleartherefore that the substance of Swar is a great light and that thatlight is the light of Surya the Sun.

We might even suppose that Swar is a word for the sun, lightor the sky if it were not clear from other passages that it is thename of a world. It is frequently alluded to as a world beyondthe Rodasi, beyond heaven and earth, and is otherwise called thewide world, uru loka, or the wide other world, uru u loka, or

The Lost Sun and the Lost Cows 151

simply that (other) world, u loka. This world is described as oneof vast light and of a wide freedom from fear where the cows,the rays of Surya, disport themselves freely. So in VI.47.8, wehave “Thou in thy knowledge leadest us on to the wide world,even Swar, the Light which is freedom from fear, with happybeing,” svar jyotir abhayam svasti. In III.2.7, Agni Vaishwanarais described as filling the earth and heaven and the vast Swar, arodası apr.n. ad a svar mahat; and so also Vasishtha says in hishymn to Vishnu, VII.99, “Thou didst support firmly, O Vishnu,this earth and heaven and uphold the earth all around by the rays(of Surya). Ye two created for the sacrifice (i.e. as its result) thewide other world (urum u lokam), bringing into being the Sun,the Dawn and Agni,” where we again see the close connectionof Swar, the wide world, with the birth or appearance of theSun and the Dawn. It is described as the result of the sacrifice,the end of our pilgrimage, the vast home to which we arrive,the other world to which those who do well the works of sac-rifice attain, sukr.tam u lokam. Agni goes as an envoy betweenearth and heaven and then encompasses with his being this vasthome, ks.ayam br.hantam pari bhus.ati, (III.3.2). It is a world ofbliss and the fullness of all the riches to which the Vedic Rishiaspires: “He for whom, because he does well his works, O AgniJatavedas, thou willest to make that other world of bliss, attainsto a felicity full of the Horses, the Sons, the Heroes, the Cows,all happy being” (V.4.11). And it is by the Light that this Blissis attained; it is by bringing to Birth the Sun and the Dawn andthe Days that the Angirases attain to it for the desiring humanrace; “Indra who winneth Swar, bringing to birth the days, hasconquered by those who desire (usigbhih. , a word applied like nr.to express men and gods, but, like nr. also, sometimes especiallyindicating the Angirases) the armies he attacks, and he has madeto shine out for man the vision of the days (ketum ahnam) andfound the Light for the great bliss,” avindaj jyotir br.hate ran. aya(III.34.4).

All this may very well be interpreted, so far as these andother isolated passages go, as a sort of Red Indian conception ofa physical world beyond the sky and the earth, a world made out


of the rays of the sun, in which the human being, freed from fearand limitation, — it is a wide world, — has his desires satisfiedand possesses quite an unlimited number of horses, cows, sonsand retainers. But what we have set out to prove is that it isnot so, that on the contrary, this wide world, br.had dyau orSwar, which we have to attain by passing beyond heaven andearth, — for so it is more than once stated, e.g. I.36.8, “Humanbeings (manus.ah. ) slaying the Coverer have crossed beyond bothearth and heaven and made the wide world for their dwellingplace,” ghnanto vr.tram ataran rodası apa uru ks.ayaya cakrire,— that this supra-celestial wideness, this illimitable light is asupramental heaven, the heaven of the supramental Truth, ofthe immortal Beatitude, and that the light which is its substanceand constituent reality, is the light of Truth. But at present itis enough to emphasise this point that it is a heaven concealedfrom our vision by a certain darkness, that it has to be foundand made visible, and that this seeing and finding depends onthe birth of the Dawn, the rising of the Sun, the upsurging ofthe Solar Herds out of their secret cave. The souls successful insacrifice become svardr.s and svarvid, seers of Swar and findersof Swar or its knowers; for vid is a root which means bothto find or get and to know and in one or two passages theless ambiguous root jna is substituted for it and the Veda evenspeaks of making the light known out of the darkness. For therest, this question of the nature of Swar or the wide world isof supreme importance for the interpretation of the Veda, sinceon it turns the whole difference between the theory of a hymnalof barbarians and the theory of a book of ancient knowledge, areal Veda. It can only be entirely dealt with in a discussion of thehundred and more passages speaking of this wide world whichwould be quite beyond the scope of these chapters. We shall,however, have to return to this question while dealing with theAngiras hymns and afterwards.

The birth of the Sun and the Dawn must therefore be re-garded as the condition of seeing or attaining to Swar, andit is this which explains the immense importance attached tothis legend or image in the Veda and to the conception of the


illumining, finding, bringing to birth of the light out of the dark-ness by the true hymn, the satya mantra. This is done by Indraand the Angirases, and numerous are the passages that alludeto it. Indra and the Angirases are described as finding Swar orthe Sun, avindat, illumining or making it to shine, arocayat,bringing it to birth, ajanayat, (we must remember that in theVeda the manifestation of the gods in the sacrifice is constantlydescribed as their birth); and winning and possessing it, sanat.Often indeed Indra alone is mentioned. It is he who makes lightfrom the nights and brings into birth the Sun, ks.apam vastajanita suryasya (III.49.4), he who has brought to their birth theSun and the Dawn (II.12.7), or, in a more ample phrase, bringsto birth together the Sun and Heaven and Dawn (VI.30.5). Byhis shining he illumines the Dawn, by his shining he makes toblaze out the sun, haryann us.asam arcayah. suryam haryannarocayah. (III.44.2). These are his great achievements, jajanasuryam us.asam sudamsah. (III.32.8), that with his shining com-rades he wins for possession the field (is this not the field in whichthe Atri saw the shining cows?), wins the sun, wins the waters,sanat ks.etram sakhibhih. svitnyebhih. sanat suryam sanad apah.suvajrah. (I.100.18). He is also he who winneth Swar, svars.a, aswe have seen, by bringing to birth the days. In isolated passageswe might take this birth of the Sun as referring to the originalcreation of the sun by the gods, but not when we take these andother passages together. This birth is his birth in conjunctionwith the Dawn, his birth out of the Night. It is by the sacrificethat this birth takes place, — indrah. suyajna us.asah. svar janat(II.21.4), “Indra sacrificing well brought to birth the Dawns andSwar”; it is by human aid that it is done, — asmakebhir nr.bhih.suryam sanat, by our “men” he wins the sun (I.100.6); and inmany hymns it is described as the result of the work of theAngirases and is associated with the delivering of the cows orthe breaking of the hill.

It is this circumstance among others that prevents us fromtaking, as we might otherwise have taken, the birth or finding ofthe Sun as simply a description of the sky (Indra) daily recoveringthe sun at dawn. When it is said of him that he finds the light


even in the blind darkness, so andhe cit tamasi jyotir vidat, it isevident that the reference is to the same light which Agni andSoma found, one light for all these many creatures, avindatamjyotir ekam bahubhyah. , when they stole the cows from thePanis (I.93.4), “the wakeful light which they who increase truthbrought into birth, a god for the god” (VIII.89.1), the secretlight (gud. ham jyotih. ) which the fathers, the Angirases, foundwhen by their true mantras they brought to birth the Dawn. Itis that which is referred to in the mystic hymn to all the gods(VIII.29.10) attributed to Manu Vaivaswata or to Kashyapa, inwhich it is said, “Certain of them singing the Rik thought outthe mighty Saman and by that they made the Sun to shine.”This is not represented as being done previous to the creationof man; for it is said in VII.91.1, “The gods who increase byour obeisance and were of old, without blame, they for manbeset (by the powers of darkness) made the Dawn to shine bythe Sun.” This is the finding of the Sun that was dwelling in thedarkness by the Angirases through their ten months’ sacrifice.Whatever may have been the origin of the image or legend, it isan old one and widespread and it supposes a long obscurationof the Sun during which man was beset by darkness. We find itnot only among the Aryans of India, but among the Mayas ofAmerica whose civilisation was a ruder and perhaps earlier typeof the Egyptian culture; there too it is the same legend of the Sunconcealed for many months in the darkness and recovered by thehymns and prayers of the wise men (the Angiras Rishis?). In theVeda the recovery of the Light is first effected by the Angirases,the seven sages, the ancient human fathers and is then constantlyrepeated in human experience by their agency.

It will appear from this analysis that the legend of the lostSun and its recovery by sacrifice and by the mantra and thelegend of the lost Cows and their recovery, also by the mantra,both carried out by Indra and the Angirases, are not two differ-ent myths, they are one. We have already asserted this identitywhile discussing the relations of the Cows and the Dawn. TheCows are the rays of the Dawn, the herds of the Sun and notphysical cattle. The lost Cows are the lost rays of the Sun; their


recovery is the forerunner of the recovery of the lost sun. But itis now necessary to put this identity beyond all possible doubtby the clear statement of the Veda itself.

For the Veda does explicitly tell us that the cows are theLight and the pen in which they are hidden is the darkness.Not only have we the passage already quoted, I.92.4, in whichthe purely metaphorical character of the cows and the pen isindicated, “Dawn uncovered the darkness like the pen of thecow”; not only have we the constant connection of the image ofthe recovery of the cows with the finding of the light as in I.93.4,“Ye two stole the cows from the Panis. . . . Ye found the one lightfor many”, or in II.24.3, “That is the work to be done for themost divine of the gods; the firm places were cast down, thefortified places were made weak; up Brihaspati drove the cows(rays), by the hymn (brahman. a) he broke Vala, he concealed thedarkness, he made Swar visible”; not only are we told in V.31.3,“He impelled forward the good milkers within the concealingpen, he opened up by the Light the all-concealing darkness”;but, in case any one should tell us that there is no connection inthe Veda between one clause of a sentence and another and thatthe Rishis are hopping about with minds happily liberated fromthe bonds of sense and reason from the Cows to the Sun andfrom the darkness to the cave of the Dravidians, we have in an-swer the absolute identification in I.33.10, “Indra the Bull madethe thunderbolt his ally” or perhaps “made it applied (yujam),he by the Light milked the rays (cows) out of the darkness,”— we must remember that the thunderbolt is the svarya asmaand has the light of Swar in it, — and again in IV.51.2, wherethere is question of the Panis, “They (the Dawns) breaking intodawn pure, purifying, opened the doors of the pen, even ofthe darkness,” vrajasya tamaso dvara. If in face of all thesepassages we insist on making a historical myth of the Cowsand the Panis, it will be because we are determined to makethe Veda mean that in spite of the evidence of the Veda itself.Otherwise we must admit that this supreme hidden wealth ofthe Panis, nidhim pan. ınam paramam guha hitam (II.24.6), is notwealth of earthly herds, but, as is clearly stated by Paruchchhepa


Daivodasi (I.130.3), “the treasure of heaven hidden in the secretcavern like the young of the Bird, within the infinite rock, likea pen of the cows”, avindad divo nihitam guha nidhim ver nagarbham parivıtam asmani anante antar asmani, vrajam vajrıgavam iva sis.asan.

The passages in which the connection of the two legendsor their identity appear, are numerous; I will only cite a fewthat are typical. We have in one of the hymns that speak atlength of this legend, I.62, “O Indra, O Puissant, thou with theDashagwas (the Angirases) didst tear Vala with the cry; hymnedby the Angirases, thou didst open the Dawns with the Sun andwith the Cows the Soma.” We have VI.17.3, “Hear the hymnand increase by the words; make manifest the Sun, slay the foe,cleave out the Cows, O Indra.” We read in VII.98.6, “All thiswealth of cows that thou seest around thee by the eye of the Sunis thine, thou art the sole lord of the cows, O Indra,” gavam asigopatir eka indra, and to show of what kind of cows Indra is thelord, we have in III.31, a hymn of Sarama and the Cows, “Thevictorious (Dawns) clove to him and they knew a great lightout of the darkness; knowing the Dawns went upward to him,Indra became the sole lord of the Cows,” patir gavam abhavadeka indrah. , and the hymn goes on to tell how it was by themind and by the discovery of the whole path of the Truth thatthe seven sages, the Angirases drove up the Cows out of theirstrong prison and how Sarama, knowing, came to the cavern inthe hill and to the voice of the imperishable herds. We have thesame connection with the Dawns and the finding of the widesolar light of Swar in VII.90.4, “The Dawns broke forth perfectin light and unhurt, they (the Angirases) meditating found thewide Light (uru jyotih. ); they who desire opened the wideness ofthe Cows, the waters flowed on them from heaven.”

So too in II.19.3 we have the Days and the Sun and theCows, — “He brought to its birth the Sun, found the Cows,effecting out of the Night the manifestations of the days.” InIV.1, the Dawns and the Cows are identified, “The good milkerswhose pen was the rock, the shining ones in their concealingprison they drove upward, the Dawns answering their call,”


unless this means, as is possible, that the Dawns called by theAngirases, “our human fathers”, who are mentioned in the pre-ceding verse, drove up for them the Cows. Then in VI.17.5 wehave the breaking of the pen as the means of the outshiningof the Sun; “Thou didst make the Sun and the Dawn to shine,breaking the firm places; thou didst move from its foundationthe great hill that enveloped the Cows”; and finally in III.39the absolute identification of the two images in their legendaryform, “None is there among mortals who can blame (or, as Ishould rather interpret, no mortal power that can confine or ob-struct) these our fathers who fought for the Cows (of the Panis);Indra of the mightiness, Indra of the works released for themthe strongly closed cow-pens; when a friend with his friendsthe Navagwas, following on his knees the cows, when with theten, the Dashagwas, Indra found the true Sun (or, as I renderit, the Truth, the Sun,) dwelling in the darkness.” The passageis conclusive; the cows are the Cows of the Panis which theAngirases pursue entering the cave on their hands and knees,the finders are Indra and the Angirases who are spoken of inother hymns as Navagwas and Dashagwas, and that which isfound by entering the cow-pens of the Panis in the cave of thehill is not the stolen wealth of the Aryans, but “the sun dwellingin the darkness”.

Therefore it is established beyond question that the cowsof the Veda, the cows of the Panis, the cows which are stolen,fought for, pursued, recovered, the cows which are desired by theRishis, the cows which are won by the hymn and the sacrifice,by the blazing fire and the god-increasing verse and the god-intoxicating Soma, are symbolic cows, are the cows of Light,are, in the other and inner Vedic sense of the words go, usra,usriya, the shining ones, the radiances, the herds of the Sun,the luminous forms of the Dawn. By this inevitable conclusionthe corner-stone of Vedic interpretation is securely founded farabove the gross materialism of a barbarous worship and theVeda reveals itself as a symbolic scripture, a sacred allegorywhether of Sun-worship and Dawn-worship or of the cult of ahigher and inner Light, of the true Sun, satyam suryam, that


dwells concealed in the darkness of our ignorance, hidden as thechild of the Bird, the divine Hansa, in the infinite rock of thismaterial existence, anante antar asmani.

Although in this chapter I have confined myself with somerigidity to the evidence that the cows are the light of the sun hidin darkness, yet their connection with the light of Truth and thesun of Knowledge has already shown itself in one or two of theverses cited. We shall see that when we examine, not separateverses, but whole passages of these Angiras hymns the hint thusgiven develops into a clear certainty. But first we must cast aglance at these Angiras Rishis and at the creatures of the cave,the friends of darkness from whom they recover the luminousherds and the lost Sun, — the enigmatic Panis.

Chapter XVI

The Angiras Rishis

THE NAME Angiras occurs in the Veda in two differentforms, Angira and Angiras, although the latter is the morecommon; we have also the patronymic Angirasa applied

more than once to the god Brihaspati. In later times Angiras,like Bhrigu and other seers, was regarded as one of the originalsages, progenitors of clans of Rishis who went by their names,the Angirasas, Atris, Bhargavas. In the Veda also there are thesefamilies of Rishis, the Atris, Bhrigus, Kanwas etc. In one ofthe hymns of the Atris the discovery of Agni, the sacred fire,is attributed to the Angiras Rishis (V.11.6), but in another tothe Bhrigus (X.46.9).1 Frequently the seven original AngirasRishis are described as the human fathers, pitaro manus.yah. ,who discovered the Light, made the sun to shine and ascendedto the heaven of the Truth. In some of the hymns of the tenthMandala they are associated as the Pitris or Manes with Yama, adeity who only comes into prominence in the later Suktas; theytake their seats with the gods on the barhis, the sacred grass,and have their share in the sacrifice.

If this were all, the explanation of the part taken by theAngiras Rishis in the finding of the Cows, would be simple andsuperficial enough; they would be the Ancestors, the foundersof the Vedic religion, partially deified by their descendants andcontinually associated with the gods whether in the winningback of the Dawn and the Sun out of the long Arctic night orin the conquest of the Light and the Truth. But this is not all,the Vedic myth has profounder aspects. In the first place, theAngirases are not merely the deified human fathers, they arealso brought before us as heavenly seers, sons of the gods, sons

1 Very possibly the Angiras Rishis are the flame-powers of Agni and the Bhrigus thesolar powers of Surya.


of heaven and heroes or powers of the Asura, the mighty Lord,divas putraso asurasya vırah. (III.53.7), an expression which,their number being seven, reminds us strongly, though perhapsonly fortuitously, of the seven Angels of Ahura Mazda in the kin-dred Iranian mythology. Moreover there are passages in whichthey seem to become purely symbolical, powers and sons of Agnithe original Angiras, forces of the symbolic Light and Flame,and even to coalesce into a single seven-mouthed Angiras withhis nine and his ten rays of the Light, navagve angire dasagvesaptasye, on and by whom the Dawn breaks out with all herjoy and opulence. And yet all these three presentations seem tobe of the same Angirases, their characteristics and their actionbeing otherwise identical.

Two entirely opposite explanations can be given of the dou-ble character of these seers, divine and human. They may havebeen originally human sages deified by their descendants and inthe apotheosis given a divine parentage and a divine function; orthey may have been originally demigods, powers of the Light andFlame, who became humanised as the fathers of the race and thediscoverers of its wisdom. Both of these processes are recognis-able in early mythology. In the Greek legend, for instance, Castorand Polydeuces and their sister Helen are human beings, thoughchildren of Zeus, and only deified after their death, but the prob-ability is that originally all three were gods, — Castor and Poly-deuces, the twins, riders of the horse, saviours of sailors on theocean being almost certainly identical with the Vedic Ashwins,the Horsemen, as their name signifies, riders in the wonderfulchariot, twins also, saviours of Bhujyu from the ocean, ferriersover the great waters, brothers of the Dawn, and Helen verypossibly the Dawn their sister or even identical with Sarama,the hound of heaven, who is, like Dakshina, a power, almost afigure of the Dawn. But in either case there has been a fartherdevelopment by which these gods or demigods have become in-vested with psychological functions, perhaps by the same processwhich in the Greek religion converted Athene, the Dawn, intothe goddess of knowledge and Apollo, the sun, into the divinesinger and seer, lord of the prophetic and poetic inspiration.

The Angiras Rishis 161

In the Veda it is possible that another tendency has beenat work, — the persistent and all-pervading habit of symbolismdominant in the minds of these ancient Mystics. Everything,their own names, the names of Kings and sacrificers, the ordi-nary circumstances of their lives were turned into symbols andcovers for their secret meaning. Just as they used the ambiguityof the word go, which means both ray and cow, so as to makethe concrete figure of the cow, the chief form of their pastoralwealth, a cover for its hidden sense of the inner light whichwas the chief element in the spiritual wealth they coveted fromthe gods, so also they would use their own names, Gotama“most full of light”, Gavisthira “the steadfast in light” to hide abroad and general sense for their thought beneath what seemeda personal claim or desire. Thus too they used the experiencesexternal and internal whether of themselves or of other Rishis.If there is any truth in the old legend of Shunahshepa bound asa victim on the altar of sacrifice, it is yet quite certain, as weshall see, that in the Rig Veda the occurrence or the legend isused as a symbol of the human soul bound by the triple cordof sin and released from it by the divine power of Agni, Surya,Varuna. So also Rishis like Kutsa, Kanwa, Ushanas Kavya havebecome types and symbols of certain spiritual experiences andvictories and placed in that capacity side by side with the gods.It is not surprising, then, that in this mystic symbolism the sevenAngiras Rishis should have become divine powers and livingforces of the spiritual life without losing altogether their tradi-tional or historic human character. We will leave, however, theseconjectures and speculations aside and examine instead the partplayed by these three elements or aspects of their personality inthe figure of the cows and the recovery of the Sun and the Dawnout of the darkness.

We note first that the word Angiras is used in the Veda asan epithet, often in connection with the image of the Dawn andthe Cows. Secondly, it occurs as a name of Agni, while Indrais said to become Angiras and Brihaspati is called Angiras andAngirasa, obviously not as a mere decorative or mythologicalappellation but with a special significance and an allusion to


the psychological or other sense attached to the word. Even theAshwins are addressed collectively as Angiras. It is thereforeclear that the word Angiras is used in the Veda not merely as aname of a certain family of Rishis, but with a distinct meaninginherent in the word. It is probable also that even when usedas a name it is still with a clear recognition of the inherentmeaning of the name; it is probable even that names in theVeda are generally, if not always, used with a certain stress ontheir significance, especially the names of gods, sages and kings.The word Indra is generally used as a name, yet we have suchsignificant glimpses of the Vedic method as the description ofUsha indratama angirastama, “most-Indra”, “most-Angiras”,and of the Panis as anindrah. , “not-Indra”, expressions whichevidently are meant to convey the possession or absence of thequalities, powers or functionings represented by Indra and theAngiras. We have then to see what may be this meaning andwhat light it sheds on the nature or functions of the AngirasRishis.

The word is akin to the name Agni; for it is derived from aroot ang which is only a nasalised form of ag, the root of Agni.These roots seem to convey intrinsically the sense of preeminentor forceful state, feeling, movement, action, light,2 and it is thislast sense of a brilliant or burning light that gives us agni, fire,angati, fire, angara, a burning coal and angiras, which must havemeant flaming, glowing. Both in the Veda and the tradition of theBrahmanas the Angirases are in their origin closely connectedwith Agni. In the Brahmanas it is said that Agni is the fire andthe Angirases the burning coals, angarah. ; but in the Veda itselfthe indication seems rather to be that they are the flames orlustres of Agni. In X.62, a hymn to the Angiras Rishis, it issaid of them that they are sons of Agni and have been bornabout him in different forms all about heaven, and in the nextclause it is added, speaking of them collectively in the singular:

2 For state we have agra, first, top and Greek agan, excessively; for feeling, Greekagape, love, and possibly Sanskrit angana, a woman; for movement and action severalwords in Sanskrit and in Greek and Latin.


navagvo nu dasagvo angirastamah. saca deves.u mamhate, nine-rayed, ten-rayed, most “Angiras”, this Angiras clan becomestogether full of plenty with or in the gods; aided by Indra theyset free the pen of cows and horses, they give to the sacrificer themystic eight-eared kine and thereby create in the gods sravas,the divine hearing or inspiration of the Truth. It is fairly evidentthat the Angiras Rishis are here the radiant lustres of the divineAgni which are born in heaven, therefore of the divine Flameand not of any physical fire; they become equipped with the ninerays of the Light and the ten, become most angiras, that is tosay most full of the blazing radiance of Agni, the divine flame,and are therefore able to release the imprisoned Light and Forceand create the supramental knowledge.

Even if this interpretation of the symbolism is not accepted,yet that there is a symbolism must be admitted. These Angirasesare not human sacrificers, but sons of Agni born in heaven,although their action is precisely that of the human Angirases,the fathers, pitaro manus.yah. ; they are born with different forms,virupasah. , and all this can only mean that they are various formsof the power of Agni. The question is of what Agni; the sacrificialflame, the element of fire generally or that other sacred flamewhich is described as “the priest with the seer-will” or “whodoes the work of the seer, the true, the rich in varied light ofinspiration,” agnir hota kavikratuh. satyas citrasravastamah.? Ifit is the element of fire, then the blazing lustre they representmust be that of the Sun, the fire of Agni radiating out as thesolar rays and in association with Indra the sky creating theDawn. There can be no other physical interpretation consistentwith the details and circumstances of the Angiras myth. But thisexplanation does not at all account for the farther descriptionof the Angiras Rishis as seers, as singers of the hymn, powers ofBrihaspati as well as of the Sun and Dawn.

There is another passage of the Veda (VI.6.3-5) in whichthe identity of these divine Angirases with the flaming lustres ofAgni is clearly and unmistakably revealed. “Wide everywhere,O pure-shining Agni, range driven by the wind thy pure shininglustres (bhamasah. ); forcefully overpowering the heavenly Nine-


rayed ones (divya navagvah. ) enjoy the woods3 (vana vananti,significantly conveying the covert sense, ‘enjoying the objectsof enjoyment’) breaking them up violently. O thou of the purelight, they bright and pure assail4 (or overcome) all the earth,they are thy horses galloping in all directions. Then thy roamingshines widely vast directing their journey to the higher level ofthe Various-coloured (the cow, Prishni, mother of the Maruts).Then doubly (in earth and heaven?) thy tongue leaps forwardlike the lightning loosed of the Bull that wars for the cows.”Sayana tries to avoid the obvious identification of the Rishiswith the flames by giving navagva the sense of “new-born rays”,but obviously divya navagvah. here and the sons of Agni (inX.62) born in heaven who are navagva are the same and can-not possibly be different; and the identification is confirmed,if any confirmation were needed, by the statement that in thisranging of Agni constituted by the action of the Navagwas histongue takes the appearance of the thunderbolt of Indra, theBull who wars for the cows, loosed from his hand and leapingforward, undoubtedly to assail the powers of darkness in thehill of heaven; for the march of Agni and the Navagwas is heredescribed as ascending the hill (sanu pr.sneh. ) after ranging overthe earth.

We have evidently here a symbolism of the Flame and theLight, the divine flames devouring the earth and then becomingthe lightning of heaven and the lustre of the solar Powers; forAgni in the Veda is the light of the sun and the lightning aswell as the flame found in the waters and shining on the earth.The Angiras Rishis being powers of Agni share this manifoldfunction. The divine flame kindled by the sacrifice supplies alsoto Indra the material of the lightning, the weapon, the heavenlystone, svarya asma, by which he destroys the powers of darknessand wins the cows, the solar illuminations.

Agni, the father of the Angirases, is not only the fount andorigin of these divine flames, he is also described in the Veda

3 The logs of the sacrificial fire, according to Sayana.4 Shave the hair of the earth, according to Sayana.


as himself the first, that is to say the supreme and originalAngiras, prathamo angirah. . What do the Vedic poets wish usto understand by this description? We can best understand by aglance at some of the passages in which this epithet is appliedto the bright and flaming deity. In the first place it is twiceassociated with another fixed epithet of Agni, the Son of Forceor of Energy, sahasah. sunuh. , urjo napat. Thus in VIII.60.2 heis addressed, “O Angiras, Son of Force,” sahasah. suno angirah. ,and in VIII.84.4, “O Agni Angiras, Son of Energy,” agne angiraurjo napat. And in V.11.6 it is said, “Thee, O Agni, the Angirasesfound established in the secret place (guha hitam) lying in woodand wood (vane vane)” or, if we accept the indication of a covertsense we have already noted in the phrase vana vananti, “ineach object of enjoyment. So art thou born by being pressed(mathyamanah. ), a mighty force; thee they call the Son of Force,O Angiras, sa jayase saho mahat tvam ahuh. sahasas putramangirah. .” It is hardly doubtful, then, that this idea of force isan essential element in the Vedic conception of the Angiras andit is, as we have seen, part of the meaning of the word. Forcein status, action, movement, light, feeling is the inherent qualityof the roots ag and ang from which we have agni and angirah. .Force but also, in these words, Light. Agni, the sacred flame,is the burning force of Light; the Angirases also are burningpowers of the Light.

But of what light? physical or figurative? We must notimagine that the Vedic poets were crude and savage intellectsincapable of the obvious figure, common to all languages, whichmakes the physical light a figure of the mental and spiritual, ofknowledge, of an inner illumination. The Veda speaks expresslyof “luminous sages”, dyumanto viprah. and the word suri, aseer, is associated with Surya, the sun, by etymology and mustoriginally have meant luminous. In I.31.1 it is said of this god ofthe Flame, “Thou, O Agni, wast the first Angiras, the seer andauspicious friend, a god, of the gods; in the law of thy workingthe Maruts with their shining spears were born, seers who dothe work by the knowledge.” Clearly, then, in the conceptionof Agni Angiras there are two ideas, knowledge and action; the


luminous Agni and the luminous Maruts are by their light seersof the knowledge, r.s.i, kavi; and by the light of knowledge theforceful Maruts do the work because they are born or manifestedin the characteristic working (vrata) of Agni. For Agni himselfhas been described to us as having the seer-will, kavikratuh. ,the force of action which works according to the inspired orsupramental knowledge (sravas), for it is that knowledge andnot intellectuality which is meant by the word kavi. What thenis this great force, Agni Angiras, saho mahat, but the flamingforce of the divine consciousness with its two twin qualities ofLight and Power working in perfect harmony, — even as theMaruts are described, kavayo vidmana apasah. , seers workingby the knowledge? We have had reason to conclude that Ushais the divine Dawn and not merely the physical, that her cowsor rays of the Dawn and the Sun are the illuminations of thedawning divine consciousness and that therefore the Sun is theIlluminer in the sense of the Lord of Knowledge and that Swar,the solar world beyond heaven and earth, is the world of thedivine Truth and Bliss, in a word, that Light in the Veda is thesymbol of knowledge, of the illumination of the divine Truth.We now begin to have reason for concluding that the Flame,which is only another aspect of Light, is the Vedic symbol forthe Force of the divine consciousness, of the supramental Truth.

In another passage, VI.11.3, we have mention of the “seermost illumined of the Angirases”, vepis.t.ho angirasam viprah. ,where the reference is not at all clear. Sayana, ignoring the col-location vepis.t.ho viprah. which at once fixes the sense of vepis.t.haas equivalent to most vipra, most a seer, most illumined, sup-poses that Bharadwaja, the traditional Rishi of the hymn, is herepraising himself as the “greatest praiser” of the gods; but this isa doubtful suggestion. Here it is Agni who is the hota, the priest;it is he who is sacrificing to the gods, to his own embodiment,tanvam tava svam, to the Maruts, Mitra, Varuna, Heaven andEarth. “For in thee” says the hymn “the thought even though fullof riches desires still the gods, the (divine) births, for the singerof the hymn that he may sacrifice to them, when the sage, themost luminous of the Angirases, utters the rhythm of sweetness


in the sacrifice.” It would almost seem that Agni himself is thesage, the most luminous of the Angirases. On the other hand,the description seems to be more appropriate to Brihaspati.

For Brihaspati is also an Angirasa and one who becomesthe Angiras. He is, as we have seen, closely associated with theAngiras Rishis in the winning of the luminous cattle and he isso associated as Brahmanaspati, as the Master of the sacred orinspired word (brahma); for by his cry Vala is split to pieces andthe cows answer lowing with desire to his call. As powers of Agnithese Rishis are like him kavikratu; they possess the divine Light,they act by it with the divine force; they are not only Rishis, butheroes of the Vedic war, divas putraso asurasya vırah. (III.53.7),sons of heaven, heroes of the Mighty Lord, they are, as describedin VI.75.9, “the Fathers who dwell in the sweetness (the worldof bliss), who establish the wide birth, moving in the difficultplaces, possessed of force, profound,5 with their bright host andtheir strength of arrows, invincible, heroes in their being, wideovercomers of the banded foes”: but also, they are, as the nextverse describes them, brahman. asah. pitarah. somyasah. , that is,they have the divine word and the inspired knowledge it carrieswith it.6 This divine word is the satya mantra, it is the thought bywhose truth the Angirases bring the Dawn to birth and make thelost Sun to rise in the heavens. This word is also called the arka,a vocable which means both hymn and light and is sometimesused of the sun. It is therefore the word of illumination, theword which expresses the truth of which the Sun is the lord,and its emergence from the secret seat of the Truth is associatedwith the outpouring by the Sun of its herded radiances; so weread in VII.36.1, “Let the Word come forward from the seatof the Truth; the Sun has released wide by its rays the cows,”pra brahmaitu sadanad r.tasya, vi rasmibhih. sasr.je suryo gah. .

5 Cf. the description in X.62.5 of the Angirases as sons of Agni, different in form, butall profound in knowledge, gambhıravepasah. .6 This seems to be the sense of the word Brahmana in the Veda. It certainly does not

mean Brahmans by caste or priests by profession; the Fathers here are warriors as wellas sages. The four castes are only mentioned in the Rig Veda once, in that profound butlate composition, the Purushasukta.


It has to be won possession of like the Sun itself and the godshave to give their aid for that possession (arkasya satau) as wellas for the possession of the Sun (suryasya satau) and of Swar(svars.atau).

The Angiras, therefore, is not only an Agni-power, he isalso a Brihaspati-power. Brihaspati is called more than once theAngirasa, as in VI.73.1, yo adribhit prathamaja r.tava br.haspatirangiraso havis.man, “Brihaspati, breaker of the hill (the cave ofthe Panis), the first-born who has the Truth, the Angirasa, heof the oblation.” And in X.47.6 we have a still more signif-icant description of Brihaspati as the Angirasa; pra saptagumr.tadhıtim sumedham br.haspatim matir accha jigati ya angirasonamasa upasadyah. . “The thought goes towards Brihaspati theseven-rayed, the truth-thinking, the perfect intelligence, who isthe Angirasa, to be approached with obeisance.” In II.23.18,also, Brihaspati is addressed as Angiras in connection with therelease of the cows and the release of the waters; “For the gloryof thee the hill parted asunder when thou didst release upwardthe pen of the cows; with Indra for ally thou didst force out, OBrihaspati, the flood of the waters which was environed by thedarkness.” We may note in passing how closely the release of thewaters, which is the subject of the Vritra legend, is associatedwith the release of the cows which is the subject of the legendof the Angiras Rishis and the Panis and that both Vritra and thePanis are powers of the darkness. The cows are the light of theTruth, the true illumining sun, satyam tad . . . suryam; the watersreleased from the environing darkness of Vritra are called some-times the streams of the Truth, r.tasya dharah. and sometimessvarvatır apah. , the waters of Swar, the luminous solar world.

We see then that the Angiras is in the first place a powerof Agni the seer-will; he is the seer who works by the light, bythe knowledge; he is a flame of the puissance of Agni, the greatforce that is born into the world to be the priest of the sacrificeand the leader of the journey, the puissance which the godsare said by Vamadeva (IV.1) to establish here as the Immortal inmortals, the energy that does the great work (arati). In the secondplace, he is a power or at least has the power of Brihaspati, the


truth-thinking and seven-rayed, whose seven rays of the lighthold that truth which he thinks (r.tadhıtim) and whose sevenmouths repeat the word that expresses the truth, the god ofwhom it is said (IV.50.4-5), “Brihaspati coming first to birth outof the great Light in the highest heaven, born in many forms,seven-mouthed, seven-rayed (saptasyah. saptarasmih. ), by his crydispelled the darkness; he by his host with the Rik and the Stubh(the hymn of illumination and the rhythm that affirms the gods)broke Vala by his cry.” It cannot be doubted that by this hostor troop of Brihaspati (sus.t.ubha r.kvata gan. ena) are meant theAngiras Rishis who by the true mantra help in the great victory.

Indra is also described as becoming an Angiras or as be-coming possessed of the Angiras quality. “May he become mostAngiras with the Angirases, being the Bull with bulls (the bullis the male power or Purusha, nr., with regard to the Rays andthe Waters who are the cows, gavah. , dhenavah. ), the Friend withfriends, the possessor of the Rik with those who have the Rik(r.gmibhir r.gmı), with those who make the journey (gatubhih. ,the souls that advance on the path towards the Vast and True)the greatest; may Indra become associated with the Maruts(marutvan) for our thriving.” The epithets here (I.100.4) are allthe proper epithets of the Angiras Rishis and Indra is supposedto take upon himself the qualities or relations that constituteAngirashood. So in III.31.7, “Most illumined in knowledge(vipratamah. , answering to the vepis.t.ho angirasam viprah. ofVI.11.3), becoming a friend (sakhıyan, the Angirases are friendsor comrades in the great battle) he went (agacchad, upon thepath, cf. gatubhih. , discovered by Sarama); the hill sped forthits pregnant contents (garbham) for the doer of the good work;strong in manhood with the young (maryo yuvabhih. , the youthalso giving the idea of unaging, undecaying force) he soughtfullness of riches and won possession (sasana makhasyan); soat once, chanting the hymn (arcan), he became an Angiras.”This Indra who assumes all the qualities of the Angiras is, wemust remember, the Lord of Swar, the wide world of the Sunor the Truth, and descends to us with his two shining horses,harı, which are called in one passage suryasya ketu, the sun’s


two powers of perception or of vision in knowledge, in orderto war with the sons of darkness and aid the great journey. Ifwe have been right in all that we have concluded with regard tothe esoteric sense of the Veda, Indra must be the Power (indra,the Puissant,7 the powerful lord) of the divine Mind born inman and there increasing by the Word and the Soma to his fulldivinity. This growth continues by the winning and growth ofthe Light, till Indra reveals himself fully as the lord of all theluminous herds which he sees by the “eye of the sun”, the divineMind master of all the illuminations of knowledge.

Indra in becoming the Angiras, becomes Marutwan, pos-sessed of or companioned by the Maruts, and these Maruts,luminous and violent gods of the storm and the lightning, unit-ing in themselves the vehement power of Vayu, the Wind, theBreath, the Lord of Life and the force of Agni, the Seer-Will,are therefore seers who do the work by the knowledge, kavayovidmana apasah. , as well as battling forces who by the power ofthe heavenly Breath and the heavenly lightning overthrow the es-tablished things, the artificial obstructions, kr.triman. i rodhamsi,in which the sons of Darkness have entrenched themselves, andaid Indra to overcome Vritra and the Dasyus. They seem to bein the esoteric Veda the Life-Powers that support by their ner-vous or vital energies the action of the thought in the attemptof the mortal consciousness to grow or expand itself into theimmortality of the Truth and Bliss. In any case, they also aredescribed in VI.49.11 as acting with the qualities of the Angiras(angirasvat), “O young and seers and powers of the sacrifice,Maruts, come uttering the word to the high place (or desirableplane of earth or the hill, adhi sanu pr.sneh. , which is probably thesense of varasyam), powers increasing, rightly moving (on thepath, gatu) like the Angiras,8 give joy even to that which is not

7 But also perhaps “shining”, cf. indu, the moon; ina, glorious, the sun; indh, tokindle.8 It is to be noted that Sayana here hazards the idea that Angiras means the moving rays

(from ang to move) or the Angiras Rishis. If the great scholar had been able to pursuewith greater courage his ideas to their logical conclusion, he would have anticipated themodern theory in its most essential points.


illumined (acitram, that which has not received the varied lightof the dawn, the night of our ordinary darkness).” We see herethe same characteristics of the Angiras action, the eternal youthand force of Agni (agne yavis.t.ha), the possession and utteranceof the Word, the seerhood, the doing of the work of sacrifice,the right movement on the great path which leads as we shall seeto the world of the Truth, to the vast and luminous bliss. TheMaruts are even said to be (X.78) as it were “Angirases withtheir Sama hymns, they who take all forms,” visvarupa angirasona samabhih. .

All this action and movement are made possible by the com-ing of Usha, the Dawn. Usha also is described as angirastamaand in addition as indratama. The power of Agni, the Angiraspower, manifests itself also in the lightning of Indra and in therays of the Dawn. Two passages may be cited which throw lighton this aspect of the Angiras force. The first is VII.79.2-3. “TheDawns make their rays to shine out in the extremities of heaven,they labour like men who are set to a work. Thy rays set fleeingthe darkness, they extend the Light as if the sun were extendingits two arms. Usha has become (or, come into being) most full ofIndra power (indratama), opulent in riches and has given birthto the inspirations of knowledge for our happy going (or forgood and bliss), the goddess, daughter of Heaven, most full ofAngirashood (angirastama), orders her riches for the doer ofgood works.” The riches in which Usha is opulent cannot beanything else than the riches of the Light and the Power of theTruth; full of Indra power, the power of the divine illuminedmind, she gives the inspirations of that mind (sravamsi) whichlead us towards the Bliss, and by the flaming radiant Angiras-power in her she bestows and arranges her treasures for thosewho do aright the great work and thus move rightly on the path,ittha naks.anto angirasvat.

The second passage is in VII.75. “Dawn, heaven-born, hasopened up (the veil of darkness) by the Truth and she comes mak-ing manifest the vastness (mahimanam), she has drawn awaythe veil of harms and of darkness (druhas tamah. ) and all thatis unloved; most full of Angirashood she manifests the paths (of


the great journey). Today, O Dawn, awake for us for the journeyto the vast bliss (mahe suvitaya), extend (thy riches) for a vaststate of enjoyment, confirm in us a wealth of varied brightness(citram) full of inspired knowledge (sravasyum), in us mortals,O human and divine. These are the lustres of the visible Dawnwhich have come varied-bright (citrah. ) and immortal; bring-ing to birth the divine workings they diffuse themselves, fillingthose of the mid-region,” janayanto daivyani vratani, apr.n. antoantariks.a vyasthuh. . Again we have the Angiras power associatedwith the journey, the revelation of its paths by the removal ofthe darkness and the bringing of the radiances of the Dawn;the Panis represent the harms (druhah. , hurts or those who hurt)done to man by the evil powers, the darkness is their cave; thejourney is that which leads to the divine happiness and the stateof immortal bliss by means of our growing wealth of light andpower and knowledge; the immortal lustres of the Dawn whichgive birth in man to the heavenly workings and fill with themthe workings of the mid-regions between earth and heaven, thatis to say, the functioning of those vital planes governed by Vayuwhich link our physical and pure mental being, may well be theAngiras powers. For they too gain and maintain the truth bymaintaining unhurt the divine workings (amardhanto devanamvratani). This is indeed their function, to bring the divine Dawninto mortal nature so that the visible goddess pouring out herriches may be there, at once divine and human, devi martes.umanus.i, the goddess human in mortals.

Chapter XVII

The Seven-Headed Thought,Swar and the Dashagwas

THE LANGUAGE of the hymns establishes, then, a doubleaspect for the Angiras Rishis. One belongs to the exter-nal garb of the Veda; it weaves together its naturalistic

imagery of the Sun, the Flame, the Dawn, the Cow, the Horse,the Wine, the sacrificial Hymn; the other extricates from thatimagery the internal sense. The Angirases are sons of the Flame,lustres of the Dawn, givers and drinkers of the Wine, singersof the Hymn, eternal youths and heroes who wrest for us theSun, the Cows, the Horses and all treasures from the graspof the sons of darkness. But they are also seers of the Truth,finders and speakers of the word of the Truth and by the powerof the Truth they win for us the wide world of Light and Im-mortality which is described in the Veda as the Vast, the True,the Right and as the own home of this Flame of which theyare the children. This physical imagery and these psychologicalindications are closely interwoven and they cannot be separatedfrom each other. Therefore we are obliged by ordinary com-mon sense to conclude that the Flame of which the Right andthe Truth is the own home is itself a Flame of that Right andTruth, that the Light which is won by the Truth and by theforce of true thought is not merely a physical light, the cowswhich Sarama finds on the path of the Truth not merely phys-ical herds, the Horses not merely the wealth of the Dravidiansconquered by invading Aryan tribes, nor even merely images ofthe physical Dawn, its light and its swiftly moving rays and thedarkness of which the Panis and Vritra are the defenders notmerely the darkness of the Indian or the Arctic night. We haveeven been able to hazard a reasonable hypothesis by which wecan disentangle the real sense of this imagery and discover the


true godhead of these shining gods and these divine, luminoussages.

The Angiras Rishis are at once divine and human seers. Thisdouble character is not in itself an extraordinary feature or pecu-liar in the Veda to these sages. The Vedic gods also have a doubleaction; divine and pre-existent in themselves, they are human intheir working upon the mortal plane when they grow in manto the great ascension. This has been strikingly expressed in theallocution to Usha, the Dawn, “goddess human in mortals”, devimartes.u manus.i. But in the imagery of the Angiras Rishis thisdouble character is farther complicated by the tradition whichmakes them the human fathers, discoverers of the Light, thePath and the Goal. We must see how this complication affectsour theory of the Vedic creed and the Vedic symbolism.

The Angiras Rishis are ordinarily described as seven in num-ber: they are sapta viprah. , the seven sages who have comedown to us in the Puranic tradition1 and are enthroned byIndian astronomy in the constellation of the Great Bear. Butthey are also described as Navagwas and Dashagwas, and if inVI.22 we are told of the ancient fathers, the seven seers whowere Navagwas, purve pitaro navagvah. sapta vipraso, yet inIII.39.5 we have mention of two different classes, Navagwas,and Dashagwas, the latter ten in number, the former presumably,though it is not expressly stated, nine. Sakha ha yatra sakhibhirnavagvair, abhijnva satvabhir ga anugman; satyam tad indrodasabhir dasagvaih. , suryam viveda tamasi ks.iyantam; “where,a friend with his friends the Navagwas, following the cows Indrawith the ten Dashagwas found that truth, even the Sun dwellingin the darkness.” On the other hand we have in IV.51 a collectivedescription of the Angiras seven-faced or seven-mouthed, nine-rayed, ten-rayed, navagve angire dasagve saptasye. In X.108.8we have another Rishi Ayasya associated with the NavagwaAngirases. In X.67 this Ayasya is described as our father whofound the vast seven-headed Thought that was born out of

1 Not that the names given them by the Purana need be those which the Vedic traditionwould have given.

The Seven-Headed Thought, Swar and the Dashagwas 175

the Truth and as singing the hymn to Indra. According as theNavagwas are seven or nine, Ayasya will be the eighth or thetenth Rishi.

Tradition asserts the separate existence of two classes of An-giras Rishis, the one Navagwas who sacrificed for nine months,the other Dashagwas whose sessions of sacrifice endured forten. According to this interpretation we must take Navagwaand Dashagwa as “nine-cowed” and “ten-cowed”, each cowrepresenting collectively the thirty Dawns which constitute onemonth of the sacrificial year. But there is at least one passageof the Rig Veda which on its surface is in direct conflict withthe traditional interpretation. For in the seventh verse of V.45and again in the eleventh we are told that it was the Navagwas,not the Dashagwas, who sacrificed or chanted the hymn for tenmonths. This seventh verse runs, Anunod atra hastayato adrir,arcan yena dasa maso navagvah. ; r.tam yatı sarama ga avindad,visvani satya angiras cakara, “Here cried (or, moved) the stoneimpelled by the hand, whereby the Navagwas chanted for tenmonths the hymn; Sarama travelling to the Truth found thecows; all things the Angiras made true.” And in verse 11 wehave the assertion repeated; Dhiyam vo apsu dadhis.e svars.am,yayataran dasa maso navagvah. ; aya dhiya syama devagopa, ayadhiya tuturyama ati amhah. . “I hold for you in the waters (i.e.the seven Rivers) the thought that wins possession of heaven2

(this is once more the seven-headed thought born from the Truthand found by Ayasya), by which the Navagwas passed throughthe ten months; by this thought may we have the gods for pro-tectors, by this thought may we pass through beyond the evil.”The statement is explicit. Sayana indeed makes a faint-heartedattempt to take dasa maso in v. 7, ten months, as if it were anepithet dasamaso, the ten-month ones i.e. the Dashagwas; buthe offers this improbable rendering only as an alternative andabandons it in the eleventh rik.

2 Sayana takes it to mean, “I recite the hymn for water” i.e. in order to get rain; thecase however is the locative plural, and dadhis.e means “I place or hold” or, with thepsychological sense, “think” or “hold in thought, meditate”. Dhis.an. a like dhı meansthought; dhiyam dadhis.e would thus mean “I think or meditate the thought.”


Must we then suppose that the poet of this hymn had forgot-ten the tradition and was confusing the Dashagwas and Nava-gwas? Such a supposition is inadmissible. The difficulty arisesbecause we suppose the Navagwas and Dashagwas to have beenin the minds of the Vedic Rishis two different classes of AngirasRishis; rather these seem to have been two different powers ofAngirashood and in that case the Navagwas themselves mightwell become Dashagwas by extending the period of the sacrificeto ten months instead of nine. The expression in the hymn, dasamaso ataran, indicates that there was some difficulty in gettingthrough the full period of ten months. It is during this periodapparently that the sons of darkness had the power to assailthe sacrifice; for it is indicated that it is only by the confirmingof the thought which conquers Swar, the solar world, that theRishis are able to get through the ten months, but this thoughtonce found they become assured of the protection of the godsand pass beyond the assault of the evil, the harms of the Panisand Vritras. This Swar-conquering thought is certainly the sameas that seven-headed thought which was born from the Truthand discovered by Ayasya the companion of the Navagwas; forby it, we are told, Ayasya becoming universal, embracing thebirths in all the worlds, brought into being a fourth world orfourfold world, which must be the supramental beyond the threelower sessions, Dyaus, Antariksha and Prithivi, that wide worldwhich, according to Kanwa son of Ghora, men reach or createby crossing beyond the two Rodasi after killing Vritra. Thisfourth world must be therefore Swar. The seven-headed thoughtof Ayasya enables him to become visvajanya, which means prob-ably that he occupies or possesses all the worlds or births of thesoul or else that he becomes universal, identifying himself withall beings born, — and to manifest or give being to a certainfourth world (Swar), turıyam svij janayad visvajanyah. (X.67.1);and the thought established in the waters which enables theNavagwa Rishis to pass through the ten months, is also svars.a,that which brings about the possession of Swar. The watersare clearly the seven rivers and the two thoughts are evidentlythe same. Must we not then conclude that it is the addition


of Ayasya to the Navagwas which raises the nine Navagwasto the number of ten and enables them by his discovery of theseven-headed Swar-conquering thought to prolong their nine-months’ sacrifice through the tenth month? Thus they becomethe ten Dashagwas. We may note in this connection that theintoxication of the Soma by which Indra manifests or increasesthe might of Swar or the Swar-Purusha (Svarn. ara) is describedas ten-rayed and illuminating (dasagvam vepayantam).

This conclusion is entirely confirmed by the passage inIII.39.5 which we have already cited. For there we find thatit is with the help of the Navagwas that Indra pursues the traceof the lost kine, but it is only with the aid of the ten Dashagwasthat he is able to bring the pursuit to a successful issue and findthat Truth, satyam tat, namely, the Sun that was lying in thedarkness. In other words, it is when the nine-months’ sacrifice isprolonged through the tenth, it is when the Navagwas becomethe ten Dashagwas by the seven-headed thought of Ayasya, thetenth Rishi, that the Sun is found and the luminous world ofSwar in which we possess the truth of the one universal Deva,is disclosed and conquered. This conquest of Swar is the aimof the sacrifice and the great work accomplished by the AngirasRishis.

But what is meant by the figure of the months? for it nowbecomes clear that it is a figure, a parable; the year is symbolic,the months are symbolic.3 It is in the revolution of the year thatthe recovery of the lost Sun and the lost cows is effected, for wehave the explicit statement in X.62.2, r.tenabhindan parivatsarevalam, “by the truth, in the revolution of the year, they brokeVala,” or, as Sayana interprets it, “by sacrifice lasting for a year.”This passage certainly goes far to support the Arctic theory, forit speaks of a yearly and not a daily return of the Sun. But weare not concerned with the external figure, nor does its valid-ity in any way affect our own theory; for it may very well bethat the striking Arctic experience of the long night, the annual

3 Observe that in the Puranas the Yugas, moments, months, etc. are all symbolic andit is stated that the body of man is the year.


sunrise and the continuous dawns was made by the Mystics thefigure of the spiritual night and its difficult illumination. But thatthis idea of Time, of the months and years is used as a symbolseems to be clear from other passages of the Veda, notably fromGritsamada’s hymn to Brihaspati, II.24.

In this hymn Brihaspati is described driving up the cows,breaking Vala by the divine word, brahman. a, concealing thedarkness and making Swar visible. The first result is the break-ing open by force of the well which has the rock for its face andwhose streams are of the honey, madhu, the Soma sweetness,asmasyam avatam madhudharam. This well of honey covered bythe rock must be the Ananda or divine beatitude of the supremethreefold world of bliss, the Satya, Tapas and Jana worlds of thePuranic system based upon the three supreme principles, Sat,Chit-Tapas and Ananda; their base is Swar of the Veda, Maharof the Upanishads and Puranas, the world of Truth.4 These fourtogether make the fourfold fourth world and are described inthe Rig Veda as the four supreme and secret seats, the source ofthe “four upper rivers”. Sometimes, however, this upper worldseems to be divided into two, Swar the base, Mayas or the divinebeatitude the summit, so that there are five worlds or births ofthe ascending soul. The three other rivers are the three lowerpowers of being and supply the principles of the three lowerworlds.

This secret well of honey is drunk by all those who are ableto see Swar and they pour out its billowing fountain of sweetnessin manifold streams together, tam eva visve papire svardr.so bahusakam sisicur utsam udrin. am. These many streams poured outtogether are the seven rivers poured down the hill by Indra afterslaying Vritra, the rivers or streams of the Truth, r.tasya dharah. ;and they represent, according to our theory, the seven principlesof conscious being in their divine fulfilment in the Truth and

4 In the Upanishads and Puranas there is no distinction between Swar and Dyaus;therefore a fourth name had to be found for the world of Truth, and this is the Mahardiscovered according to the Taittiriya Upanishad by the Rishi Mahachamasya as thefourth Vyahriti, the other three being Swar, Bhuvar and Bhur, i.e. Dyaus, Antarikshaand Prithivi of the Veda.


Bliss. This is why the seven-headed thought, — that is to say, theknowledge of the divine existence with its seven heads or powers,the seven-rayed knowledge of Brihaspati, saptagum, has to beconfirmed or held in thought in the waters, the seven rivers, thatis to say the seven forms of divine consciousness are to be heldin the seven forms or movements of divine being; dhiyam voapsu dadhis.e svars.am, I hold the Swar-conquering thought inthe waters.

That the making visible of Swar to the eyes of the Swar-seers, svardr.sah. , their drinking of the honeyed well and theiroutpouring of the divine waters amounts to the revelation toman of new worlds or new states of existence is clearly toldus in the next verse, II.24.5, sana ta ka cid bhuvana bhavıtva,madbhih. saradbhir duro varanta vah. ; ayatanta carato anyadanyad id, ya cakara vayuna brahman. aspatih. , “Certain eter-nal worlds (states of existence) are these which have to comeinto being, their doors are shut5 to you (or, opened) by themonths and the years; without effort one (world) moves in theother, and it is these that Brahmanaspati has made manifestto knowledge”; vayuna means knowledge, and the two formsare divinised earth and heaven which Brahmanaspati created.These are the four eternal worlds hidden in the guha, the secret,unmanifest or superconscient parts of being which although inthemselves eternally present states of existence (sana bhuvana)are for us non-existent and in the future; for us they have to bebrought into being, bhavıtva, they are yet to be created. There-fore the Veda sometimes speaks of Swar being made visible,as here (vyacaks.ayat svah. ), or discovered and taken possessionof, vidat, sanat, sometimes of its being created or made (bhu,kr.). These secret eternal worlds have been closed to us, says theRishi, by the movement of Time, by the months and years; there-fore naturally they have to be discovered, revealed, conquered,

5 Sayana says varanta is here “opened”, which is quite possible, but vr. means ordinarilyto shut, close up, cover, especially when applied to the doors of the hill whence flow therivers and the cows come forth; Vritra is the closer of the doors. Vi vr. and apa vr. meanto open. Nevertheless, if the word means here to open, that only makes our case all thestronger.


created in us by the movement of Time, yet in a sense against it.This development in an inner or psychological Time is, it seemsto me, that which is symbolised by the sacrificial year and by theten months that have to be spent before the revealing hymn ofthe soul (brahma) is able to discover the seven-headed, heaven-conquering thought which finally carries us beyond the harmsof Vritra and the Panis.

We get the connection of the rivers and the worlds veryclearly in I.62 where Indra is described as breaking the hill bythe aid of the Navagwas and breaking Vala by the aid of theDashagwas. Hymned by the Angiras Rishis Indra opens up thedarkness by the Dawn and the Sun and the Cows, he spreads outthe high plateau of the earthly hill into wideness and upholds thehigher world of heaven. For the result of the opening up of thehigher planes of consciousness is to increase the wideness of thephysical, to raise the height of the mental. “This, indeed,” saysthe Rishi Nodha, “is his mightiest work, the fairest achievementof the achiever,” dasmasya carutamam asti damsah. , “that thefour upper rivers streaming honey nourish the two worlds ofthe crookedness,” upahvare yad upara apinvan madhvarn. asonadyas catasrah. . This is again the honey-streaming well pour-ing down its many streams together; the four higher rivers ofthe divine being, divine conscious force, divine delight, divinetruth nourishing the two worlds of the mind and body intowhich they descend with their floods of sweetness. These two,the Rodasi, are normally worlds of crookedness, that is to sayof the falsehood, — the r.tam or Truth being the straight, theanr.tam or Falsehood the crooked, — because they are exposedto the harms of the undivine powers, Vritras and Panis, sonsof darkness and division. They now become forms of the truth,the knowledge, vayuna, agreeing with outer action and this isevidently Gritsamada’s carato anyad anyad and his ya cakaravayuna brahman. aspatih. . The Rishi then proceeds to define theresult of the work of Ayasya, which is to reveal the true eter-nal and unified form of earth and heaven. “In their twofold(divine and human?) Ayasya uncovered by his hymns the two,eternal and in one nest; perfectly achieving he upheld earth and


heaven6 in the highest ether (of the revealed superconscient,paramam guhyam) as the Enjoyer his two wives.” The soul’senjoyment of its divinised mental and bodily existence upheld inthe eternal joy of the spiritual being could not be more clearlyand beautifully imaged.

These ideas and many of the expressions are the same asthose of the hymn of Gritsamada. Nodha says of the Night andDawn, the dark physical and the illumined mental conscious-ness that they new-born (punarbhuva) about heaven and earthmove into each other with their own proper movements, sve-bhir evaih. . . . carato anyanya (cf. Gritsamada’s ayatanta caratoanyad anyad, ayatanta bearing the same sense as svebhir evaih. ,i.e. spontaneously), in the eternal friendship that is workedout by the high achievement of their son who thus upholdsthem, sanemi sakhyam svapasyamanah. , sunur dadhara savasasudamsah. . In Gritsamada’s hymn as in Nodha’s the Angirasesattain to Swar, — the Truth from which they originally came,the “own home” of all divine Purushas, — by the attainmentof the truth and by the detection of the falsehood. “They whotravel towards the goal and attain that treasure of the Panis,the supreme treasure hidden in the secret cave, they, having theknowledge and perceiving the falsehoods, rise up again thitherwhence they came and enter into that world. Possessed of thetruth, beholding the falsehoods they, seers, rise up again into thegreat path,” mahas pathah. , the path of the Truth, or the greatand wide realm, Mahas of the Upanishads.

We begin now to unravel the knot of this Vedic imagery.Brihaspati is the seven-rayed Thinker, saptaguh. , saptarasmih. ,he is the seven-faced or seven-mouthed Angiras, born in manyforms, saptasyas tuvijatah. , nine-rayed, ten-rayed. The sevenmouths are the seven Angirases who repeat the divine word(brahma) which comes from the seat of the Truth, Swar, and ofwhich he is the lord (brahman. aspatih. ). Each also corresponds to

6 This and many other passages show clearly, conclusively, as it seems to me, that theanyad anyad, the two are always earth and heaven, the human based on the physicalconsciousness and the divine based on the supraphysical, heaven.


one of the seven rays of Brihaspati; therefore they are the sevenseers, sapta viprah. , sapta r.s.ayah. , who severally personify theseseven rays of the knowledge. These rays are, again, the sevenbrilliant horses of the sun, sapta haritah. , and their full unionconstitutes the seven-headed Thought of Ayasya by which thelost sun of Truth is recovered. That thought again is establishedin the seven rivers, the seven principles of being divine and hu-man, the totality of which founds the perfect spiritual existence.The winning of these seven rivers of our being withheld byVritra and these seven rays withheld by Vala, the possession ofour complete divine consciousness delivered from all falsehoodby the free descent of the truth, gives us the secure possessionof the world of Swar and the enjoyment of mental and physicalbeing lifted into the godhead above darkness, falsehood anddeath by the in-streaming of our divine elements. This victoryis won in twelve periods of the upward journey, represented bythe revolution of the twelve months of the sacrificial year, theperiods corresponding to the successive dawns of a wider andwider truth, until the tenth secures the victory. What may bethe precise significance of the nine rays and the ten, is a moredifficult question which we are not yet in a position to solve; butthe light we already have is sufficient to illuminate all the mainimagery of the Rig Veda.

The symbolism of the Veda depends upon the image of thelife of man as a sacrifice, a journey and a battle. The ancientMystics took for their theme the spiritual life of man, but, inorder both to make it concrete to themselves and to veil its secretsfrom the unfit, they expressed it in poetical images drawn fromthe outward life of their age. That life was largely an existence ofherdsmen and tillers of the soil for the mass of the people variedby the wars and migrations of the clans under their kings, and inall this activity the worship of the gods by sacrifice had becomethe most solemn and magnificent element, the knot of all the rest.For by the sacrifice were won the rain which fertilised the soil, theherds of cattle and horses necessary for their existence in peaceand war, the wealth of gold, land (ks.etra), retainers, fighting-men which constituted greatness and lordship, the victory in the


battle, safety in the journey by land and water which was sodifficult and dangerous in those times of poor means of com-munication and loosely organised inter-tribal existence. All theprincipal features of that outward life which they saw aroundthem the mystic poets took and turned into significant images ofthe inner life. The life of man is represented as a sacrifice to thegods, a journey sometimes figured as a crossing of dangerouswaters, sometimes as an ascent from level to level of the hillof being, and, thirdly, as a battle against hostile nations. Butthese three images are not kept separate. The sacrifice is also ajourney; indeed the sacrifice itself is described as travelling, asjourneying to a divine goal; and the journey and the sacrifice areboth continually spoken of as a battle against the dark powers.

The legend of the Angirases takes up and combines all thesethree essential features of the Vedic imagery. The Angirases arepilgrims of the light. The phrase naks.antah. or abhinaks.antah.is constantly used to describe their characteristic action. Theyare those who travel towards the goal and attain to the highest,abhinaks.anto abhi ye tam anasur nidhim paramam, “they whotravel to and attain that supreme treasure” (II.24.6). Their actionis invoked for carrying forward the life of man farther towardsits goal, sahasrasave pra tiranta ayuh. (III.53.7). But this journey,if principally of the nature of a quest, the quest of the hiddenlight, becomes also by the opposition of the powers of darknessan expedition and a battle. The Angirases are heroes and fightersof that battle, gos.u yodhah. , “fighters for the cows or rays”.Indra marches with them saran.yubhih. , as travellers on the path,sakhibhih. , comrades, r.kvabhih. and kavibhih. , seers and singersof the sacred chant, but also satvabhih. , fighters in the battle.They are frequently spoken of by the appellation nr. or vıra,as when Indra is said to win the luminous herds asmakebhih.nr.bhih. , “by our men”. Strengthened by them he conquers inthe journey and reaches the goal, naks.ad-dabham taturim. Thisjourney or march proceeds along the path discovered by Sarama,the hound of heaven, the path of the Truth, r.tasya panthah. , thegreat path, mahas pathah. , which leads to the realms of the Truth.It is also the sacrificial journey; for its stages correspond to the


periods of the sacrifice of the Navagwas and it is effected by theforce of the Soma-wine and the sacred Word.

The drinking of the Soma-wine as the means of strength,victory and attainment is one of the pervading figures of theVeda. Indra and the Ashwins are the great Soma-drinkers, butall the gods have their share of the immortalising draught. TheAngirases also conquer in the strength of the Soma. Saramathreatens the Panis with the coming of Ayasya and the Nava-gwa Angirases in the keen intensity of their Soma rapture, ehagamann r.s.ayah. somasita ayasyo angiraso navagvah. (X.108.8). Itis the great force by which men have the power to follow the pathof the Truth. “That rapture of the Soma we desire by which thou,O Indra, didst make to thrive the Might of Swar (or the Swar-soul, svarn. aram), that rapture ten-rayed and making a light ofknowledge (or, shaking the whole being with its force, dasagvamvepayantam) by which thou didst foster the ocean; that Soma-intoxication by which thou didst drive forward the great waters(the seven rivers) like chariots to their sea, — that we desire thatwe may travel on the path of the truth,” pantham r.tasya yatavetam ımahe (VIII.12.2-3). It is in the power of the Soma that thehill is broken open, the sons of darkness overthrown. This Soma-wine is the sweetness that comes flowing from the streams of theupper hidden world, it is that which flows in the seven waters,it is that with which the ghr.ta, the clarified butter of the mysticsacrifice, is instinct; it is the honeyed wave which rises out ofthe ocean of life. Such images can have only one meaning; it isthe divine delight hidden in all existence which, once manifest,supports all life’s crowning activities and is the force that finallyimmortalises the mortal, the amr.tam, ambrosia of the gods.

But it is especially the Word that the Angirases possess;their seerhood is their most distinguishing characteristic. Theyare brahman. asah. pitarah. somyasah. . . . r.tavr.dhah. (VI.75.10),the fathers who are full of the Soma and have the word and aretherefore increasers of the Truth. Indra in order to impel themon the path joins himself to the chanted expressions of theirthought and gives fullness and force to the words of their soul,angirasam ucatha jujus.van brahma tutod gatum is.n. an (II.20.5).


It is when enriched in light and force of thought by the Angirasesthat Indra completes his victorious journey and reaches the goalon the mountain; “In him our primal fathers, the seven seers,the Navagwas, increase their plenty, him victorious on his marchand breaking through (to the goal), standing on the mountain,inviolate in speech, most luminous-forceful by his thinkings,”naks.ad-dabham taturim parvates.t.ham, adroghavacam matibhih.savis.t.ham (VI.22.2). It is by singing the Rik, the hymn of illu-mination, that they find the solar illuminations in the cave ofour being, arcanto7 ga avindan (I.62.2). It is by the stubh, theall-supporting rhythm of the hymn of the seven seers, by thevibrating voice of the Navagwas that Indra becomes full of thepower of Swar, svaren.a svaryah. and by the cry of the Dashagwasthat he rends Vala in pieces (I.62.4). For this cry is the voice ofthe higher heaven, the thunder that cries in the lightning-flashof Indra, and the advance of the Angirases on their path is theforward movement of this cry of the heavens, pra brahman. oangiraso naks.anta, pra krandanur nabhanyasya vetu (VII.42.1);for we are told that the voice of Brihaspati the Angirasa dis-covering the Sun and the Dawn and the Cow and the light ofthe Word is the thunder of Heaven, br.haspatir us.asam suryamgam, arkam viveda stanayann iva dyauh. (X.67.5). It is by thesatya mantra, the true thought expressed in the rhythm of thetruth, that the hidden light is found and the Dawn brought tobirth, gud. ham jyotih. pitaro anvavindan, satyamantra ajanayannus.asam (VII.76.4). For these are the Angirases who speak aright,ittha vadadbhih. angirobhih. (VI.18.5), masters of the Rik whoplace perfectly their thought, svadhıbhir r.kvabhih. (VI.32.2);they are the sons of heaven, heroes of the Mighty Lord whospeak the truth and think the straightness and therefore theyare able to hold the seat of illumined knowledge, to mentalisethe supreme abode of the sacrifice, r.tam samsanta r.ju dıdhyana,divas putraso asurasya vırah. ; vipram padam angiraso dadhana,yajnasya dhama prathamam mananta (X.67.2).

7 Arcati (r.c) in the Veda means to shine and to sing the Rik; arka means sun, light andthe Vedic hymn.


It is impossible that such expressions should convey nothingmore than the recovery of stolen cows from Dravidian cave-dwellers by some Aryan seers led by a god and his dog orelse the return of the Dawn after the darkness of the night.The wonders of the Arctic dawn themselves are insufficient toexplain the association of images and the persistent stress on theidea of the Word, the Thought, the Truth, the journey and theconquest of the falsehood which meets us always in these hymns.Only the theory we are enouncing, a theory not brought in fromoutside but arising straight from the language and the sugges-tions of the hymns themselves, can unite this varied imagery andbring an easy lucidity and coherence into this apparent tangleof incongruities. In fact, once the central idea is grasped and thementality of the Vedic Rishis and the principle of their symbolismare understood, no incongruity and no disorder remain. Thereis a fixed system of symbols which, except in some of the laterhymns, does not admit of any important variations and in thelight of which the inner sense of the Veda everywhere yields itselfup readily enough. There is indeed a certain restricted freedom inthe combination of the symbols, as in those of any fixed poeticalimagery, — for instance, the sacred poems of the Vaishnavas; butthe substance of thought behind is constant, coherent and doesnot vary.

Chapter XVIII

The Human Fathers

THESE characteristics of the Angiras Rishis seem at firstsight to indicate that they are in the Vedic system a classof demigods, in their outward aspect personifications or

rather personalities of the Light and the Voice and the Flame, butin their inner aspect powers of the Truth who second the godsin their battles. But even as divine seers, even as sons of Heavenand heroes of the Lord, these sages represent aspiring human-ity. True, they are originally the sons of the gods, devaputrah. ,children of Agni, forms of the manifoldly born Brihaspati, andin their ascent to the world of the Truth they are described asascending back to the place from whence they came; but evenin these characteristics they may well be representative of thehuman soul which has itself descended from that world and hasto reascend; for it is in its origin a mental being, son of im-mortality (amr.tasya putrah. ), a child of Heaven born in Heavenand mortal only in the bodies that it assumes. And the part ofthe Angiras Rishis in the sacrifice is the human part, to find theword, to sing the hymn of the soul to the gods, to sustain andincrease the divine Powers by the praise, the sacred food and theSoma-wine, to bring to birth by their aid the divine Dawn, towin the luminous forms of the all-radiating Truth and to ascendto its secret, far and high-seated home.

In this work of the sacrifice they appear in a double form,1

the divine Angirases, r.s.ayo divyah. , who symbolise and presideover certain psychological powers and workings like the gods,and the human fathers, pitaro manus.yah. , who like the Ribhus,also described as human beings or at least human powers that

1 It is to be noted that the Puranas distinguish specifically between two classes of Pitris,the divine Fathers, a class of deities, and the human Ancestors, to both of whom thepin.d. a is offered. The Puranas, obviously, only continue in this respect the original Vedictradition.


have conquered immortality by the work, have attained the goaland are invoked to assist a later mortal race in the same divineachievement. Quite apart from the later Yama hymns of the tenthMandala in which the Angirases are spoken of as BarhishadPitris along with the Bhrigus and Atharvans and receive theirown peculiar portion in the sacrifice, they are in the rest of theVeda also called upon in a less definite but a larger and moresignificant imagery. It is for the great human journey that theyare invoked; for it is the human journey from the mortality to theimmortality, from the falsehood to the truth that the Ancestorsaccomplished, opening the way to their descendants.

We see this characteristic of their working in VII.42 andVII.52. The first of these two hymns of Vasishtha is a Suktain which the gods are invoked precisely for this great journey,adhvara yajna,2 the sacrifice that travels or is a travel to thehome of the godheads and at the same time a battle: for thusit is sung, “Easy of travelling for thee is the path, O Agni, andknown to thee from of old. Yoke in the Soma-offering thy ruddy(or, actively-moving) mares which bear the hero. Seated, I callthe births divine” (verse 2). What path is this? It is the pathbetween the home of the gods and our earthly mortality downwhich the gods descend through the antariks.a, the vital regions,to the earthly sacrifice and up which the sacrifice and man bythe sacrifice ascends to the home of the gods. Agni yokes hismares, his variously-coloured energies or flames of the divineForce he represents, which bear the Hero, the battling powerwithin us that performs the journey. And the births divine are atonce the gods themselves and those manifestations of the divinelife in man which are the Vedic meaning of the godheads. Thatthis is the sense becomes clear from the fourth Rik. “When the

2 Sayana takes a-dhvara yajna, the unhurt sacrifice; but “unhurt” can never have cometo be used as a synonym of sacrifice. Adhvara is “travelling”, “moving”, connected withadhvan, a path or journey from the lost root adh, to move, extend, be wide, compact,etc. We see the connection between the two words adhvan and adhvara in adhva, air, skyand adhvara with the same sense. The passages in the Veda are numerous in which theadhvara or adhvara yajna is connected with the idea of travelling, journeying, advancingon the path.

The Human Fathers 189

Guest that lodges in the bliss has become conscious in knowledgein the gated house of the hero rich (in felicity), when Agni isperfectly satisfied and firmly lodged in the house, then he givesthe desirable good to the creature that makes the journey” or, itmay be, for his journeying.

The hymn is therefore an invocation to Agni for the jour-ney to the supreme good, the divine birth, the bliss. And itsopening verse is a prayer for the necessary conditions of thejourney, the things that are said here to constitute the formof the pilgrim sacrifice, adhvarasya pesah. , and among thesecomes first the forward movement of the Angirases; “Forwardlet the Angirases travel, priests of the Word, forward go thecry of heaven (or, of the heavenly thing, cloud or lightning),forward move the fostering Cows that diffuse their waters, andlet the two pressing-stones be yoked (to their work) — the formof the pilgrim sacrifice,” pra brahman. o angiraso naks.anta, prakrandanur nabhanyasya vetu; pra dhenava udapruto navanta,yujyatam adrı adhvarasya pesah. . The Angirases with the divineWord, the cry of Heaven which is the voice of Swar the luminousheaven and of its lightnings thundering out from the Word, thedivine waters or seven rivers that are set free to their flowing bythat heavenly lightning of Indra the master of Swar, and with theoutflowing of the divine waters the outpressing of the immor-talising Soma, these constitute the form, pesah. , of the adhvarayajna. And its general characteristic is forward movement, theadvance of all to the divine goal, as emphasised by the threeverbs of motion, naks.anta, vetu, navanta and the emphatic pra,forward, which opens and sets the key to each clause.

But the fifty-second hymn is still more significant andsuggestive. The first Rik runs, “O Sons of the infinite Mother(adityaso), may we become infinite beings (aditayah. syama),may the Vasus protect in the godhead and the mortality(devatra martyatra); possessing may we possess you, O Mitraand Varuna, becoming may we become you, O Heaven andEarth,” sanema mitravarun. a sananto, bhavema dyavapr.thivıbhavantah. . This is evidently the sense that we are to possessand become the infinities or children of Aditi, the godheads,


aditayah. , adityaso. Mitra and Varuna, we must remember, arepowers of Surya Savitri, the Lord of the Light and the Truth.And the third verse runs, “May the Angirases who hastenthrough to the goal move in their travelling to the bliss ofthe divine Savitri; and that (bliss) may our great Father, he ofthe sacrifice, and all the gods becoming of one mind accept inheart.” Turan.yavo naks.anta ratnam devasya savitur iyanah. . It isquite clear therefore that the Angirases are travellers to the lightand truth of the solar deity from which are born the luminouscows they wrest from the Panis and to the bliss which, as wealways see, is founded on that light and truth. It is clear alsothat this journey is a growing into the godhead, into the infinitebeing (aditayah. syama), said in this hymn (verse 2) to come bythe growth of the peace and bliss through the action in us ofMitra, Varuna and the Vasus who protect us in the godhead andthe mortality.

In these two hymns the Angiras Rishis generally are men-tioned; but in others we have positive references to the hu-man Fathers who first discovered the Light and possessed theThought and the Word and travelled to the secret worlds ofthe luminous Bliss. In the light of the conclusions at which wehave arrived, we can now study the more important passages,profound, beautiful and luminous, in which this great discoveryof the human forefathers is hymned. We shall find there thesummary of that great hope which the Vedic mystics held everbefore their eyes; that journey, that victory is the ancient, primalachievement set as a type by the luminous Ancestors for themortality that was to come after them. It was the conquest of thepowers of the circumscribing Night (ratrı paritakmya), Vritras,Sambaras and Valas, the Titans, Giants, Pythons, subconscientPowers who hold the light and the force in themselves, in theircities of darkness and illusion, but can neither use it aright norwill give it up to man, the mental being. Their ignorance, eviland limitation have not merely to be cut away from us, butbroken up and into and made to yield up the secret of light andgood and infinity. Out of this death that immortality has to beconquered. Pent up behind this ignorance is a secret knowledge


and a great light of truth; prisoned by this evil is an infinitecontent of good; in this limiting death is the seed of a boundlessimmortality. Vala, for example, is Vala of the radiances, valamgomantam, his body is made of the light, govapus.am valam, hishole or cave is a city full of treasures; that body has to be brokenup, that city rent open, those treasures seized. This is the workset for humanity and the Ancestors have done it for the racethat the way may be known and the goal reached by the samemeans and through the same companionship with the gods ofLight. “Let there be that ancient friendship between you godsand us as when with the Angirases who spoke aright the word,thou didst make to fall that which was fixed and slewest Valaas he rushed against thee, O achiever of works, and thou didstmake to swing open all the doors of his city” (VI.18.5). At thebeginning of all human traditions there is this ancient memory.It is Indra and the serpent Vritra, it is Apollo and the Python,it is Thor and the Giants, Sigurd and Fafner, it is the mutuallyopposing gods of the Celtic mythology; but only in the Veda dowe find the key to this imagery which conceals the hope or thewisdom of a prehistoric humanity.

The first hymn we will take is one by the great Rishi, Vishwa-mitra, III.39; for it carries us right into the heart of our subject.It sets out with a description of the ancestral Thought, pitryadhıh. , the Thought of the fathers which can be no other than theSwar-possessing thought hymned by the Atris, the seven-headedthought discovered by Ayasya for the Navagwas; for in thishymn also it is spoken of in connection with the Angirases, theFathers. “The thought expressing itself from the heart, formedinto the Stoma, goes towards Indra its lord.” Indra is, we havesupposed, the Power of luminous Mind, master of the world ofLight and its lightnings; the words or the thoughts are constantlyimaged as cows or women, Indra as the Bull or husband, and thewords desire him and are even spoken of as casting themselvesupwards to seek him, e.g. I.9.4, girah. prati tvam ud ahasatavr.s.abham patim. The luminous Mind of Swar is the goal soughtby the Vedic thought and the Vedic speech which express theherd of the illuminations pressing upward from the soul, from


the cave of the subconscient in which they were penned; Indramaster of Swar is the Bull, the lord of these herds, gopatih. .

The Rishi continues to describe the Thought. It is “thethought that when it is being expressed, remains wakeful inthe knowledge,” does not lend itself to the slumber of the Panis,ya jagr.vir vidathe sasyamana; “that which is born of thee (or,for thee), O Indra, of that take knowledge.” This is a constantformula in the Veda. The god, the divine, has to take cognizanceof what rises up to him in man, to become awake to it in theknowledge within us, (viddhi, cetathah. , etc.), otherwise it re-mains a human thing and does not “go to the gods”, (deves.ugacchati). And then, “It is ancient (or eternal), it is born fromheaven; when it is being expressed, it remains wakeful in theknowledge; wearing white and happy robes, this in us is theancient thought of the fathers,” seyam asme sanaja pitrya dhıh. .And then the Rishi speaks of this Thought as “the mother oftwins, who here gives birth to the twins; on the tip of the tongueit descends and stands; the twin bodies when they are borncleave to each other and are slayers of darkness and move inthe foundation of burning force.” I will not now discuss whatare these luminous twins, for that would carry us beyond thelimits of our immediate subject: suffice it to say that they arespoken of elsewhere in connection with the Angirases and theirestablishment of the supreme birth (the plane of the Truth) asthe twins in whom Indra places the word of the expression(I.83.3), that the burning force in whose foundation they moveis evidently that of the Sun, the slayer of darkness, and thisfoundation is therefore identical with the supreme plane, thefoundation of the Truth, r.tasya budhnah. , and, finally, that theycan hardly be wholly unconnected with the twin children ofSurya, Yama and Yami, — Yama who in the tenth Mandala isassociated with the Angiras Rishis.3

Having thus described the ancestral thought with its twin

3 It is in the light of these facts that we must understand the colloquy of Yama andYami in the tenth Mandala in which the sister seeks union with her brother and is putoff to later generations, meaning really symbolic periods of time, the word for latersignifying rather “higher”, uttara.


children, slayers of darkness, Vishwamitra proceeds to speak ofthe ancient Fathers who first formed it and of the great victoryby which they discovered “that Truth, the sun lying in the dark-ness”. “None is there among mortals who can blame (or, as itrather seems to me to mean, no power of mortality that can con-fine or bind) our ancient fathers, they who were fighters for thecows; Indra of the mightiness, Indra of the achievement releasedupward for them the fortified pens, — there where, a comradewith his comrades, the fighters, the Navagwas, following onhis knees the cows, Indra with the ten Dashagwas found thatTruth, satyam tad, even the sun dwelling in the darkness.” Thisis the usual image of the conquest of the luminous cattle and thediscovery of the hidden Sun; but in the next verse it is associatedwith two other related images which also occur frequently in theVedic hymns, the pasture or field of the cow and the honey foundin the cow. “Indra found the honey stored in the Shining One,the footed and hoofed (wealth) in the pasture4 of the Cow.” TheShining One, usriya (also usra), is another word which like gomeans both ray and cow and is used as a synonym of go in theVeda. We hear constantly of the ghr.ta or clarified butter stored inthe cow, hidden there by the Panis in three portions according toVamadeva; but it is sometimes the honeyed ghr.ta and sometimessimply the honey, madhumad ghr.tam and madhu. We have seenhow closely the yield of the cow, the ghr.ta, and the yield ofthe Soma plant are connected in other hymns and now that weknow definitely what is meant by the Cow, this strange and in-congruous connection becomes clear and simple enough. Ghr.taalso means shining, it is the shining yield of the shining cow;it is the formed light of conscious knowledge in the mentalitywhich is stored in the illumined consciousness and it is liberatedby the liberation of the Cow: Soma is the delight, beatitude,Ananda inseparable from the illumined state of the being; andas there are, according to the Veda, three planes of mentalityin us, so there are three portions of the ghr.ta dependent on the

4 Name goh. . Nama from nam to move, range, Greek nemo; nama is the range, pasture,Greek nomos.


three gods Surya, Indra and Soma, and the Soma also is offeredin three parts, on the three levels of the hill, tris.u sanus.u. Wemay hazard the conjecture, having regard to the nature of thethree gods, that Soma releases the divine light from the sensementality, Indra from the dynamic mentality, Surya from thepure reflective mentality. As for the pasture of the cow we arealready familiar with it; it is the field or ks.etra which Indrawins for his shining comrades from the Dasyu and in which theAtri beheld the warrior Agni and the luminous cows, those ofwhom even the old became young again. This field, ks.etra, isonly another image for the luminous home (ks.aya) to which thegods by the sacrifice lead the human soul.

Vishwamitra then proceeds to indicate the real mystic senseof all this imagery. “He having Dakshina with him held in hisright hand (daks.in. e daks.in. avan) the secret thing that is placedin the secret cave and concealed in the waters. May he, know-ing perfectly, separate the light from the darkness, jyotir vr.n. ıtatamaso vijanan, may we be far from the presence of the evil.”We have here a clue to the sense of this goddess Dakshina whoseems in some passages to be a form or epithet of the Dawnand in others that which distributes the offerings in the sacrifice.Usha is the divine illumination and Dakshina is the discerningknowledge that comes with the dawn and enables the Powerin the mind, Indra, to know aright and separate the light fromthe darkness, the truth from the falsehood, the straight fromthe crooked, vr.n. ıta vijanan. The right and left hand of Indraare his two powers of action in knowledge; for his two armsare called gabhasti, a word which means ordinarily a ray of thesun but also forearm, and they correspond to his two perceptivepowers, his two bright horses, harı, which are described as sun-eyed, suracaks.asa and as vision-powers of the Sun, suryasyaketu. Dakshina presides over the right-hand power, daks.in. a, andtherefore we have the collocation daks.in. e daks.in. avan. It is thisdiscernment which presides over the right action of the sacrificeand the right distribution of the offerings and it is this whichenables Indra to hold the herded wealth of the Panis securely, inhis right hand. And finally we are told what is this secret thing


that was placed for us in the cave and is concealed in the watersof being, the waters in which the Thought of the Fathers hasto be set, apsu dhiyam dadhis.e. It is the hidden Sun, the secretLight of our divine existence which has to be found and takenout by knowledge from the darkness in which it is concealed.That this light is not physical is shown by the word vijanan, forit is through right knowledge that it has to be found, and bythe moral result, viz. that we go far from the presence of evil,duritad, literally, the wrong going, the stumbling to which weare subjected in the night of our being before the sun has beenfound, before the divine Dawn has arisen.

Once we have the key to the meaning of the Cows, the Sun,the Honey-Wine, all the circumstances of the Angiras legendand the action of the Fathers, which are such an incongruouspatchwork in the ritualistic or naturalistic and so hopelesslyimpossible in the historical or Arya-Dravidian interpretation ofthe hymns, become on the contrary perfectly clear and connectedand each throws light on the other. We understand each hymnin its entirety and in relation to other hymns; each isolatedline, each passage, each scattered reference in the Vedas fallsinevitably and harmoniously into a common whole. We know,here, how the Honey, the Bliss can be said to be stored in theCow, the shining Light of the Truth; what is the connection ofthe honey-bearing Cow with the Sun, lord and origin of thatLight; why the discovery of the Sun dwelling in the darknessis connected with the conquest or recovery of the cows of thePanis by the Angirases; why it is called the discovery of thatTruth; what is meant by the footed and hoofed wealth and thefield or pasture of the Cow. We begin to see what is the caveof the Panis and why that which is hidden in the lair of Vala issaid also to be hidden in the waters released by Indra from thehold of Vritra, the seven rivers possessed by the seven-headedheaven-conquering thought of Ayasya; why the rescue of the sunout of the cave, the separation or choosing of the light out ofthe darkness is said to be done by an all-discerning knowledge;who are Dakshina and Sarama and what is meant by Indraholding the hoofed wealth in his right hand. And in arriving at


these conclusions we have not to wrest the sense of words, tointerpret the same fixed term by different renderings accordingto our convenience of the moment or to render differently thesame phrase or line in different hymns, or to make incoherence astandard of right interpretation; on the contrary, the greater thefidelity to word and form of the Riks, the more conspicuously thegeneral and the detailed sense of the Veda emerge in a constantclearness and fullness.

We have therefore acquired the right to apply the sensewe have discovered to other passages such as the hymn ofVasishtha which I shall next examine, VII.76, although to asuperficial glance it would seem to be only an ecstatic picture ofthe physical Dawn. This first impression, however, disappearswhen we examine it; we see that there is a constant suggestionof a profounder meaning and, the moment we apply the key wehave found, the harmony of the real sense appears. The hymncommences with a description of that rising of the Sun into thelight of the supreme Dawn which is brought about by the godsand the Angirases. “Savitri, the god, the universal Male, hasascended into the Light that is immortal and of all the births,jyotir amr.tam visvajanyam; by the work (of sacrifice) the eye ofthe gods has been born (or, by the will-power of the gods visionhas been born); Dawn has manifested the whole world (or, allthat comes into being, all existences, visvam bhuvanam).” Thisimmortal light into which the sun rises is elsewhere called thetrue light, r.tam jyotih. , Truth and immortality being constantlyassociated in the Veda. It is the light of the knowledge given bythe seven-headed thought which Ayasya discovered when he be-came visvajanya, universal in his being; therefore this light too iscalled visvajanya, for it belongs to the fourth plane, the turıyamsvid of Ayasya, from which all the rest are born and by whosetruth all the rest are manifested in their large universality andno longer in the limited terms of the falsehood and crookedness.Therefore it is called also the eye of the gods and the divinedawn that makes manifest the whole of existence.

The result of this birth of divine vision is that man’s pathmanifests itself to him and those journeyings of the gods or to


the gods (devayanah. ) which lead to the infinite wideness of thedivine existence. “Before me the paths of the journeyings of thegods have become visible, journeyings that violate not, whosemovement was formed by the Vasus. The eye of Dawn has comeinto being in front and she has come towards us (arriving) overour houses.” The house in the Veda is the constant image forthe bodies that are dwelling-places of the soul, just as the fieldor habitation means the planes to which it mounts and in whichit rests. The path of man is that of his journey to the supremeplane and that which the journeyings of the gods do not violateis, as we see, in the fifth verse where the phrase is repeated,the workings of the gods, the divine law of life into which thesoul has to grow. We have then a curious image which seems tosupport the Arctic theory. “Many were those days which werebefore the rising of the Sun (or which were of old by the rising ofthe Sun), in which thou, O Dawn, wert seen as if moving aboutthy lover and not coming again.” This is certainly a picture ofcontinual dawns, not interrupted by Night, such as are visiblein the Arctic regions. The psychological sense which arises outof the verse, is obvious.

What were these dawns? They were those created by theactions of the Fathers, the ancient Angirases. “They indeed hadthe joy (of the Soma) along with the gods,5 the ancient seerswho possessed the truth; the fathers found the hidden Light;they, having the true thought (satyamantrah. , the true thoughtexpressed in the inspired Word), brought into being the Dawn.”And to what did the Dawn, the path, the divine journeyinglead the Fathers? To the level wideness, samane urve, termedelsewhere the unobstructed vast, urau anibadhe, which is evi-dently the same as that wide being or world which, accordingto Kanwa, men create when they slay Vritra and pass beyondheaven and earth; it is the vast Truth and the infinite being ofAditi. “In the level wideness they meet together and unite theirknowledge (or, know perfectly) and strive not together; they

5 I adopt provisionally the traditional rendering of sadhamadah. though I am not surethat it is the correct rendering.


diminish not (limit not or hurt not) the workings of the gods, notviolating them they move (to their goal) by (the strength of) theVasus.” It is evident that the seven Angirases, whether human ordivine, represent different principles of the Knowledge, Thoughtor Word, the seven-headed thought, the seven-mouthed word ofBrihaspati, and in the level wideness these are harmonised in auniversal knowledge; the error, crookedness, falsehood by whichmen violate the workings of the gods and by which differentprinciples of their being, consciousness, knowledge enter intoconfused conflict with each other, have been removed by the eyeor vision of the divine Dawn.

The hymn closes with the aspiration of the Vasishthas to-wards this divine and blissful Dawn as leader of the herds andmistress of plenty and again as leader of the felicity and the truths(sunr.tanam). They desire to arrive at the same achievement asthe primal seers, the fathers and it would follow that these arethe human and not the divine Angirases. In any case the senseof the Angiras legend is fixed in all its details, except the exactidentity of the Panis and the hound Sarama, and we can turnto the consideration of the passages in the opening hymns ofthe fourth Mandala in which the human fathers are explicitlymentioned and their achievement described. These hymns ofVamadeva are the most illuminating and important for this as-pect of the Angiras legend and they are in themselves among themost interesting in the Rig Veda.

Chapter XIX

The Victory of the Fathers

THE HYMNS addressed by the great Rishi Vamadeva tothe divine Flame, to the Seer-Will, Agni are among themost mystic in expression in the Rig Veda and though

quite plain in their sense if we hold firmly in our mind the systemof significant figures employed by the Rishis, will otherwise seemonly a brilliant haze of images baffling our comprehension. Thereader has at every moment to apply that fixed notation which isthe key to the sense of the hymns; otherwise he will be as much ata loss as a reader of metaphysics who has not mastered the senseof the philosophical terms that are being constantly used or, letus say, one who tries to read Panini’s Sutras without knowingthe peculiar system of grammatical notation in which they areexpressed. We have, however, already enough light upon thissystem of images to understand well enough what Vamadeva hasto tell us about the great achievement of the human forefathers.

In order to hold clearly in our minds at the start what thatgreat achievement was we may put before ourselves the clearand sufficient formulas in which Parashara Shaktya expressesthem. “Our fathers broke open the firm and strong places bytheir words, yea, the Angirases broke open the hill by their cry;they made in us the path to the great heaven; they found theDay and Swar and vision and the luminous Cows,” cakrur divobr.hato gatum asme, ahah. svar vividuh. ketum usrah. , (I.71.2).This path, he tells us, is the path which leads to immortality;“they who entered into all things that bear right fruit formed apath towards the immortality; earth stood wide for them by thegreatness and by the Great Ones, the mother Aditi with her sonscame (or, manifested herself) for the upholding” (I.72.9).1 That

1 A ye visva svapatyani tasthuh. , kr.n. vanaso amr.tatvaya gatum; mahna mahadbhih.pr.thivı vi tasthe, mata putrair aditir dhayase veh. .


is to say, the physical being visited by the greatness of the infiniteplanes above and by the power of the great godheads who reignon those planes breaks its limits, opens out to the Light and isupheld in its new wideness by the infinite Consciousness, motherAditi, and her sons, the divine Powers of the supreme Deva. Thisis the Vedic immortality.

The means of this finding and expanding are also very suc-cinctly stated by Parashara in his mystic, but still clear andimpressive style. “They held the truth, they enriched its thought;then indeed, aspiring souls (aryah. ), they, holding it in thought,bore it diffused in all their being,” dadhann r.tam dhanayannasya dhıtim, ad id aryo didhis.vo vibhr.trah. , (I.71.3). The imagein vibhr.trah. suggests the upholding of the thought of the Truthin all the principles of our being or, to put it in the ordinaryVedic image, the seven-headed thought in all the seven waters,apsu dhiyam dadhis.e, as we have seen it elsewhere expressedin almost identical language; this is shown by the image thatimmediately follows, — “the doers of the work go towards theunthirsting (waters) which increase the divine births by the satis-faction of delight,” atr.s.yantır apaso yanti accha, devan janmaprayasa vardhayantıh. . The sevenfold Truth-consciousness in thesatisfied sevenfold Truth-being increasing the divine births in usby the satisfaction of the soul’s hunger for the Beatitude, this isthe growth of immortality. It is the manifestation of that trinityof divine being, light and bliss which the Vedantins afterwardscalled Sachchidananda.

The sense of this universal diffusion of Truth and the birthand activity of all the godheads in us assuring a universal andimmortal life in place of our present limited mortality is madeyet clearer by Parashara in I.68. Agni, the divine Seer-Will, isdescribed as ascending to heaven and unrolling the veil of thenights from all that is stable and all that is mobile, “when hebecomes the one God encompassing all these godheads withthe greatness of his being. Then indeed all accept and cleaveto the Will (or the Work) when, O godhead, thou art born aliving soul from the dryness (i.e. from the material being, thedesert, as it is called, unwatered by the streams of the Truth);

The Victory of the Fathers 201

all enjoy godhead attaining to the truth and the immortality bytheir movements, bhajanta visve devatvam nama, r.tam sapantoamr.tam evaih. . The impulse of the Truth, the thinking of theTruth becomes a universal life (or pervades all the life), and init all fulfil their workings,” r.tasya pres.a r.tasya dhıtir, visvayurvisve apamsi cakruh. .

And in order that we may not, haunted by the unfortunatemisconstruction of the Veda which European scholarship hasimposed on the modern mind, carry with us the idea of the sevenearthly rivers of the Punjab into the super-terrestrial achievementof the human forefathers, we will note what Parashara in hisclear and illuminating fashion tells us about the seven rivers.“The fostering cows of the Truth (dhenavah. , an image appliedto the rivers, while gavah. or usrah. expresses the luminouscows of the Sun) nourished him, lowing, with happy udders,enjoyed in heaven; obtaining right thinking as a boon fromthe supreme (plane) the rivers flowed wide and evenly overthe hill,” r.tasya hi dhenavo vavasanah. , smadudhnıh. pıpayantadyubhaktah. ; paravatah. sumatim bhiks.aman. a, vi sindhavah.samaya sasrur adrim, (I.73.6). And in I.72.8, speaking of themin a phrase which is applied to the rivers in other hymns, he says,“The seven mighty ones of heaven, placing aright the thought,knowing the Truth, discerned in knowledge the doors of felicity;Sarama found the fastness, the wideness of the luminous cows;thereby the human creature enjoys the bliss,” svadhyo diva asapta yahvı, rayo duro vi r.tajna ajanan; vidad gavyam saramadr.d.ham urvam, yena nu kam manus.ı bhojate vit.. These areevidently not the waters of the Punjab, but the rivers of Heaven,the streams of the Truth,2 goddesses like Saraswati, who possessthe Truth in knowledge and open by it the doors of the beatitudeto the human creature. We see here too what I have alreadyinsisted on, that there is a close connection between the findingof the Cows and the outflowing of the Rivers; they are parts

2 Note that in I.32 Hiranyastupa Angirasa describes the waters released from Vritraas “ascending the mind”, mano ruhan. ah. , and elsewhere they are called the waters thathave the knowledge, apo vicetasah. (I.83.1).


of one action, the achievement of the truth and immortality bymen, r.tam sapanto amr.tam evaih. .

It is now perfectly clear that the achievement of the An-girases is the conquest of the Truth and the Immortality, thatSwar called also the great heaven, br.hat dyauh. , is the planeof the Truth above the ordinary heaven and earth which canbe no other than the ordinary mental and physical being; thatthe path of the great heaven, the path of the Truth created bythe Angirases and followed by the hound Sarama is the pathto the Immortality, amr.tatvaya gatum; that the vision (ketu) ofthe Dawn, the Day won by the Angirases, is the vision properto the Truth-consciousness; that the luminous cows of the Sunand Dawn wrested from the Panis are the illuminations of thistruth-consciousness which help to form the thought of the Truth,r.tasya dhıtih. , complete in the seven-headed thought of Ayasya;that the Night of the Veda is the obscured consciousness of themortal being in which the Truth is subconscient, hidden in thecave of the hill; that the recovery of the lost sun lying in thisdarkness of Night is the recovery of the sun of Truth out ofthe darkened subconscient condition; and that the downflowingearthward of the seven rivers must be the outstreaming actionof the sevenfold principle of our being as it is formulated in theTruth of the divine or immortal existence. Equally then must thePanis be the powers that prevent the Truth from emerging outof the subconscient condition and that constantly strive to stealits illuminations from man and throw him back into the Night,and Vritra must be the power that obstructs and prevents thefree movement of the illumined rivers of the Truth, obstructsthe impulsion of the Truth in us, r.tasya pres.a, the luminousimpulsion, jyotis.matım is.am, which carries us beyond the Nightto the immortality. And the gods, the sons of Aditi, must beon the contrary the luminous divine powers, born of the infiniteconsciousness Aditi, whose formation and activity in our humanand mortal being are necessary for our growth into the godhead,into the being of the Deva (devatvam) which is the Immortality.Agni, the truth-conscious seer-will, is the principal godhead whoenables us to effect the sacrifice; he leads it on the path of the


Truth, he is the warrior of the battle, the doer of the work, andhis unity and universality in us comprehending in itself all theother godheads is the basis of the Immortality. The plane of theTruth to which we arrive is his own home and the own home ofthe other gods, and the final home also of the soul of man. Andthis immortality is described as a beatitude, a state of infinitespiritual wealth and plenitude, ratna, rayi, vaja, radhas, etc.; theopening doors of our divine home are the doors of the felicity,rayo durah. , the divine doors which swing wide open to thosewho increase the Truth (r.tavr.dhah. ) and which are discovered forus by Saraswati and her sisters, by the seven Rivers, by Sarama;to them and to the wide pasture (ks.etra) in the unobstructedand equal infinities of the vast Truth Brihaspati and Indra leadupward the shining Herds.

With these conceptions clearly fixed in our minds we shall beable to understand the verses of Vamadeva which only repeat insymbolic language the substance of the thought expressed moreopenly by Parashara. It is to Agni the Seer-Will that Vamadeva’sopening hymns are addressed. He is hymned as the friend orbuilder of man’s sacrifice who awakes him to the vision, theknowledge (ketu), sa cetayan manus.o yajnabandhuh. (IV.1.9); sodoing, “he dwells in the gated homes of this being, accomplish-ing; he, a god, has come to be the means of accomplishmentof the mortal,” sa ks.eti asya duryasu sadhan, devo martasyasadhanitvam apa. What is it that he accomplishes? The nextverse tells us. “May this Agni lead us in his knowledge towardsthat bliss of him which is enjoyed by the gods, that which bythe thought all the immortals created and Dyauspita the fatherout-pouring the Truth”; sa tu no agnir nayatu prajanann, accharatnam devabhaktam yad asya; dhiya yad visve amr.ta akr.n. van,dyaus.pita janita satyam uks.an. This is Parashara’s beatitudeof the Immortality created by all the powers of the immortalgodhead doing their work in the thought of the Truth and inits impulsion, and the out-pouring of the Truth is evidently theout-pouring of the waters as is indicated by the word uks.an,Parashara’s equal diffusion of the seven rivers of the truth overthe hill.


Vamadeva then goes on to tell us of the birth of this great,first or supreme force, Agni, in the Truth, in its waters, in itsoriginal home. “He was born, the first, in the waters, in thefoundation of the vast world (Swar), in its womb, (i.e. its seatand birthplace, its original home); without head and feet, con-cealing his two extremities, setting himself to his work in thelair of the Bull.” The Bull is the Deva or Purusha, his lair isthe plane of the Truth, and Agni the Seer-Will, working in thetruth-consciousness, creates the worlds; but he conceals his twoextremities, his head and feet; that is to say, his workings actbetween the superconscient and the subconscient in which hishighest and his lowest states are respectively concealed, one inan utter light, the other in an utter darkness. From that he goesforth as the first and supreme force and is born to the Bull or theLord by the action of the seven powers of the Bliss, the sevenBeloved. “He went forward by illumined knowledge as the firstforce, in the seat of the Truth, in the lair of the Bull, desirable,young, full in body, shining wide; the seven Beloved bore him tothe Lord.”

The Rishi then comes to the achievement of the humanfathers, asmakam atra pitaro manus.ya, abhi pra sedur r.tamasus.an. ah. : “Here our human fathers seeking possession of theTruth went forward to it; the bright cows in their coveringprison, the good milkers whose pen is in the rock they droveupward (to the Truth), the Dawns answered their call. Theyrent the hill asunder and made them bright; others all aroundthem declared wide this (Truth) of theirs; drivers of the herdsthey sang the hymn to the doer of works (Agni), they foundthe light, they shone in their thoughts (or, they accomplishedthe work by their thoughts). They with the mind that seeks thelight (the cows, gavyata manasa) rent the firm and compact hillthat environed the luminous cows; the souls that desire openedby the divine word, vacasa daivyena, the firm pen full of thekine.” These are the ordinary images of the Angiras legend, butin the next verse Vamadeva uses a still more mystic language.“They conceived in mind the first name of the fostering cows,they found the thrice seven supreme (seats) of the Mother; the


females of the herd knew that and they followed after it; theruddy one was manifested by the victorious attainment (or,the splendour) of the cow of Light,” te manvata prathamamnama dhenos, trih. sapta matuh. paraman. i vindan; taj janatırabhyanus.ata vra, avirbhuvad arun. ır yasasa goh. . The Motherhere is Aditi, the infinite consciousness, who is the Dhenu orfostering Cow with the seven rivers for her sevenfold streamingas well as Go the Cow of Light with the Dawns for her children;the Ruddy One is the divine Dawn and the herd or rays areher dawning illuminations. The first name of the Mother withher thrice seven supreme seats, that which the dawns or mentalilluminations know and move towards, must be the name ordeity of the supreme Deva, who is infinite being and infiniteconsciousness and infinite bliss, and the seats are the three divineworlds, called earlier in the hymn the three supreme births ofAgni, Satya, Tapas and Jana of the Puranas, which correspondto these three infinities of the Deva and each fulfils in its ownway the sevenfold principle of our existence: thus we get theseries of thrice seven seats of Aditi manifested in all her gloryby the opening out of the Dawn of Truth.3 Thus we see that theachievement of the Light and Truth by the human fathers is alsoan ascent to the Immortality of the supreme and divine status,to the first name of the all-creating infinite Mother, to her thriceseven supreme degrees of this ascending existence, to the highestlevels of the eternal hill (sanu, adri).

This immortality is the beatitude enjoyed by the gods ofwhich Vamadeva has already spoken as the thing which Agni hasto accomplish by the sacrifice, the supreme bliss with its thriceseven ecstasies (I.20.7). For he proceeds; “Vanished the dark-ness, shaken in its foundation; Heaven shone out (rocata dyauh. ,implying the manifestation of the three luminous worlds of Swar,divo rocanani); upward rose the light of the divine Dawn; theSun entered the vast fields (of the Truth) beholding the straight

3 The same idea is expressed by Medhatithi Kanwa (I.20.7) as the thrice seven ecstasiesof the Beatitude, ratnani trih. saptani, or more literally, the ecstasies in their three seriesof seven, each of which the Ribhus bring out in their separate and complete expression,ekam ekam susastibhih. .


things and the crooked in mortals. Thereafter indeed they awokeand saw utterly (by the sun’s separation of the straight from thecrooked, the truth from the falsehood); then indeed they heldin them the bliss that is enjoyed in heaven, ratnam dharayantadyubhaktam. Let all the gods be in all our homes, let there bethe truth for our thought, O Mitra, O Varuna”; visve visvasuduryasu deva, mitra dhiye varun. a satyam astu. This is evidentlythe same idea as has been expressed in different language byParashara Shaktya, the pervasion of the whole existence by thethought and impulse of the Truth and the working of all thegodheads in that thought and impulsion to create in every partof our existence the bliss and the immortality.

The hymn closes thus: “May I speak the word towards Agnishining pure, the priest of the offering greatest in sacrifice whobrings to us the all; may he press out both the pure udder of theCows of Light and the purified food of the plant of delight (theSoma) poured out everywhere. He is the infinite being of all thelords of sacrifice (the gods) and the guest of all human beings;may Agni, accepting into himself the increasing manifestationof the gods, knower of the births, be a giver of happiness.”

In the second hymn of the fourth Mandala we get veryclearly and suggestively the parallelism of the seven Rishis whoare the divine Angirases and the human fathers. The passage ispreceded by four verses, IV.2.11-14, which bring in the idea ofthe human seeking after the Truth and the Bliss. “May he theknower discern perfectly the Knowledge and the Ignorance, thewide levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; and, O God, fora bliss fruitful in offspring, lavish on us Diti and protect Aditi.”This eleventh verse is very striking in its significance. We havethe opposition of the Knowledge and the Ignorance familiar toVedanta; and the Knowledge is likened to the wide open levelswhich are frequently referred to in the Veda; they are the largelevels to which those ascend who labour in the sacrifice and theyfind there Agni seated self-blissful (V.7.5); they are the wide beingwhich he makes for his own body (V.4.6), the level wideness, theunobstructed vast. It is therefore the infinite being of the Devato which we arrive on the plane of the Truth, and it contains


the thrice seven supreme seats of Aditi the Mother, the threesupreme births of Agni within the Infinite, anante antah. (IV.1.7).The Ignorance on the other hand is identified with the crookedor uneven levels4 which shut in mortals and it is therefore thelimited, divided mortal existence. Moreover it is evident thatthe Ignorance is the Diti of the next half-verse, ditim ca rasvaaditim urus.ya, and the Knowledge is Aditi. Diti, called alsoDanu, means division and the obstructing powers or Vritras areher children, Danus, Danavas, Daityas, while Aditi is existencein its infinity and the mother of the gods. The Rishi desires a blissfruitful in offspring, that is in divine works and their results andthis is to be effected through the conquest of all the riches heldin itself by our divided mortal being but kept from us by theVritras and Panis and through the holding of them in the infinitedivine being. The latter is to be in us protected from the ordinarytendency of our human existence, from subjection to the sons ofDanu or Diti. The idea is evidently identical with that of the IshaUpanishad which declares the possession of the Knowledge andthe Ignorance, the unity and the multiplicity in the one Brahmanas the condition for the attainment of Immortality.

We then come to the seven divine seers. “The seers uncon-quered declared the Seer (the Deva, Agni) holding him withinin the homes of the human being; thence (from this embodiedhuman being) mayst thou, O Agni, aspiring by the work (aryah. ),behold by thy advancing movements these of whom thou musthave the vision, the transcendent ones (the godheads of theDeva)”; kavim sasasuh. kavayo adabdha, nidharayanto duryasuayoh. ; atas tvam dr.syan agna etan, pad. bhih. pasyer adbhutanarya evaih. . This is again the journey to the vision of the God-head. “Thou, O Agni, youngest power, art the perfect guide (onthat journey) to him who sings the word and offers the Soma andorders the sacrifice; bring to the illumined who accomplishes the

4 Cittim acittim cinavad vi vidvan, pr.s.t.heva vıta vr.jina ca martan. Vr.jina meanscrooked, and is used in the Veda to indicate the crookedness of the falsehood as opposedto the open straightness of the Truth, but the poet has evidently in his mind the verbalsense of vr.j, to separate, screen off, and it is this verbal sense in the adjective that governsmartan.


work the bliss with its vast delight for his increasing, satisfyingthe doer of the work (or, the man, cars.an. iprah. ). Now, O Agni, ofall that we have done with our hands and our feet and our bodiesthe right thinkers (the Angirases) make as it were thy chariot bythe work of the two arms (Heaven and Earth, bhurijoh. ); seekingto possess the Truth they have worked their way to it (or woncontrol of it),” r.tam yemuh. sudhya asus.an. ah. . “Now as the sevenseers of Dawn the Mother, the supreme disposers (of the sacri-fice), may we beget for ourselves the gods; may we become theAngirases, sons of Heaven, breaking open the wealth-filled hill,shining in purity.” We have here very clearly the seven divineSeers as the supreme ordainers of the world-sacrifice and theidea of the human being “becoming” these seven Seers, that isto say, creating them in himself and growing into that whichthey mean, just as he becomes the Heaven and Earth and theother gods or, as it is otherwise put, begets or creates or forms(jan, kr., tan) the divine births in his own being.

Next the example of the human fathers is given as theoriginal type of this great becoming and achievement. “Nowalso, even as our supreme ancient fathers, O Agni, seeking topossess the Truth, expressing the Word, travelled to the purityand the light; breaking open the earth (the material being) theyuncovered the ruddy ones (the Dawns, the Cows); perfected inworks and in light, seeking the godheads, gods, forging the Birthslike iron (or, forging the divine births like iron), making Agnia pure flame, increasing Indra, they attained and reached thewideness of the Light (of the Cows, gavyam urvam). As if herdsof the Cow in the field of riches, that was manifested to visionwhich is the Births of the Gods within, O puissant One; theyboth accomplished the wide enjoyments (or, longings) of mortalsand worked as aspirers for the increase of the higher being”; ayutheva ks.umati pasvo akhyad, devanam yaj janima anti ugra;martanam cid urvasır akr.pran, vr.dhe cid arya uparasya ayoh. .Evidently, this is a repetition in other language of the doubleidea of possessing the riches of Diti, yet safeguarding Aditi. “Wehave done the work for thee, we have become perfect in works,the wide-shining Dawns have taken up their home in the Truth


(or, have robed themselves with the Truth), in the fullness ofAgni and his manifold delight, in the shining eye of the god inall his brightness.”

The Angirases are again mentioned in IV.3.11, and some ofthe expressions which lead up to this verse, are worth noting;for it cannot be too often repeated that no verse in the Veda canbe properly understood except by reference to its context, to itsplace in the thought of the Sukta, to all that precedes and allthat follows. The hymn opens with a call to men to create Agniwho sacrifices in the truth, to create him in his form of goldenlight (hiran. yarupam, the gold being always the symbol of thesolar light of the Truth, r.tam jyotih. ) before the Ignorance canform itself, pura tanayitnor acittat. The god is asked to awakento the work of man and the truth in him as being himself “theTruth-conscious who places aright the thought”, r.tasya bodhir.tacit svadhıh. , — for all falsehood is merely a wrong placing ofthe Truth. He is to refer all fault and sin and defect in man tothe various godheads or divine powers of the Divine Being sothat it may be removed and the man declared finally blamelessbefore the Infinite Mother — aditaye anagasah. , or for the infiniteexistence, as it is elsewhere expressed.

Then in the ninth and tenth verses we have, expressed invarious formulas, the idea of the united human and divineexistence, Diti and Aditi, the latter founding, controlling andflooding with itself the former. “The Truth controlled by theTruth I desire (i.e. the human by the divine), together the unripethings of the Cow and her ripe and honeyed yield (again theimperfect human and the perfect and blissful divine fruits ofthe universal consciousness and existence); she (the cow) beingblack (the dark and divided existence, Diti) is nourished by theshining water of the foundation, the water of the companionstreams (jamaryen. a payasa). By the Truth Agni the Bull, theMale, sprinkled with the water of its levels, ranges unquivering,establishing wideness (wide space or manifestation); the dappledBull milks the pure shining teat.” The symbolic opposition be-tween the shining white purity of the One who is the source, seat,foundation and the variegated colouring of the Life manifested


in the triple world is frequent in the Veda; this image of thedappled Bull and the pure-bright udder or source of the watersonly repeats therefore, like the other images, the idea of themultiple manifestations of the human life purified, tranquillisedin its activities, fed by the waters of the Truth and the Infinity.

Finally the Rishi proceeds to the coupling, which we sorepeatedly find, of the luminous Cows and the Waters. “By theTruth the Angirases broke open and hurled asunder the hill andcame to union with the Cows; human souls, they took up theirdwelling in the blissful Dawn, Swar became manifest when Agniwas born. By Truth the divine immortal waters, unoppressed,with their honeyed floods, O Agni, like a horse breasting forwardin its gallopings ran in an eternal flowing.” These four verses infact are meant to give the preliminary conditions for the greatachievement of the Immortality. They are the symbols of thegrand Mythus, the mythus of the Mystics in which they hidtheir supreme spiritual experience from the profane and, alas!effectively enough from their posterity. That they were secretsymbols, images meant to reveal the truth which they protectedbut only to the initiated, to the knower, to the seer, Vamadevahimself tells us in the most plain and emphatic language in thelast verse of this very hymn; “All these are secret words that Ihave uttered to thee who knowest, O Agni, O Disposer, wordsof leading, words of seer-knowledge that express their meaningto the seer, — I have spoken them illumined in my words andmy thinkings”; eta visva vidus.e tubhyam vedho, nıthani agnenin. ya vacamsi; nivacana kavaye kavyani, asamsis.am matibhirvipra ukthaih. . Secret words that have kept indeed their secretignored by the priest, the ritualist, the grammarian, the pandit,the historian, the mythologist, to whom they have been wordsof darkness or seals of confusion and not what they were to thesupreme ancient forefathers and their illumined posterity, nin. yavacamsi nıthani nivacana kavyani.

Chapter XX

The Hound of Heaven

THERE yet remain two constant features of the Angiraslegend with regard to which we have to acquire a littlefarther light in order to master entirely this Vedic con-

ception of the Truth and the discovery of the illuminations ofthe Dawn by the primeval Fathers; we have to fix the identityof Sarama and the exact function of the Panis, two problems ofVedic interpretation which are very closely related to each other.That Sarama is some power of the Light and probably of theDawn is very clear; for once we know that the struggle betweenIndra and the original Aryan seers on the one hand and the sonsof the Cave on the other is no strange deformation of primitiveIndian history but a symbolic struggle between the powers ofLight and Darkness, Sarama who leads in the search for theradiant herds and discovers both the path and the secret hold inthe mountain must be a forerunner of the dawn of Truth in thehuman mind. And if we ask ourselves what power among thetruth-finding faculties it is that thus discovers out of the darknessof the unknown in our being the truth that is hidden in it, we atonce think of the intuition. For Sarama is not Saraswati, she isnot the inspiration, even though the names are similar. Saraswatigives the full flood of the knowledge; she is or awakens thegreat stream, maho arn.ah. , and illumines with plenitude all thethoughts, dhiyo visva vi rajati. Saraswati possesses and is theflood of the Truth; Sarama is the traveller and seeker on its pathwho does not herself possess but rather finds that which is lost.Neither is she the plenary word of the revelation, the Teacherof man like the goddess Ila; for even when what she seeks isfound, she does not take possession but only gives the messageto the seers and their divine helpers who have still to fight forthe possession of the light that has been discovered.

Let us see, however, what the Veda itself says of Sarama.


There is a verse, I.104.5, which does not mention her name,nor is the hymn itself about the Angirases or Panis, yet the linedescribes accurately enough the part attributed to her in theVeda: — “When this guide became visible, she went, knowing,towards the seat that is as if the home of the Dasyu,” prati yatsya nıtha adarsi dasyor, oko na accha sadanam janatı gat. Theseare the two essential characteristics of Sarama; the knowledgecomes to her beforehand, before vision, springs up instinctivelyat the least indication and with that knowledge she guides therest of the faculties and divine powers that seek. And she leadsto that seat, sadanam, the home of the Destroyers, which is atthe other pole of existence to the seat of the Truth, sadanamr.tasya, in the cave or secret place of darkness, guhayam, justas the home of the gods is in the cave or secrecy of light. Inother words, she is a power descended from the superconscientTruth which leads us to the light that is hidden in ourselves, inthe subconscient. All these characteristics apply exactly to theintuition.

Sarama is mentioned by name only in a few hymns of theVeda, and invariably in connection with the achievement of theAngirases or the winning of the highest planes of existence. Themost important of these hymns is the Sukta of the Atris we havealready had to take note of in our scrutiny of the Navagwa andDashagwa Angirases, V.45. The first three verses summarise thegreat achievement. “Severing the hill of heaven by the words hefound them, yea, the radiant ones of the arriving Dawn wentabroad; he uncovered those that were in the pen, Swar roseup; a god opened the human doors. The Sun attained widely tostrength and glory; the Mother of the Cows (the Dawn), know-ing, came from the wideness; the rivers became rushing floods,floods that cleft (their channel), heaven was made firm like awell-shaped pillar. To this word the contents of the pregnant hill(came forth) for the supreme birth of the Great Ones (the riversor, less probably, the dawns); the hill parted asunder, heavenwas perfected (or, accomplished itself); they lodged (upon earth)and distributed the largeness.” It is of Indra and the Angirasesthat the Rishi is speaking, as the rest of the hymn shows and

The Hound of Heaven 213

as is indeed evident from the expressions used; for these arethe usual formulas of the Angiras mythus and repeat the exactexpressions that are constantly used in the hymns of the deliveryof the Dawn, the Cows and the Sun. We know already what theymean. The hill of our already formed triple existence which risesinto heaven at its summit is rent asunder by Indra and the hiddenilluminations go abroad; Swar, the higher heaven of the super-conscient, is manifested by the upward streaming of the brilliantherds. The sun of Truth diffuses all the strength and glory of itslight, the inner Dawn comes from the luminous wideness instinctwith knowledge, — janatı gat, the same phrase that is used of herwho leads to the house of the Dasyu in I.104.5; and of Sarama inIII.31.6, — the rivers of the Truth, representing the outflow of itsbeing and its movement (r.tasya pres.a), descend in their rushingstreams and make a channel here for their waters; heaven, themental being, is perfected and made firm like a well-shaped pillarto support the vast Truth of the higher or immortal life that isnow made manifest and the largeness of that Truth is lodged herein all the physical being. The delivery of the pregnant contentsof the hill, parvatasya garbhah. , the illuminations constitutingthe seven-headed thought, r.tasya dhıtih. , which come forth inanswer to the inspired word, leads to the supreme birth of theseven great rivers who constitute the substance of the Truth putinto active movement, r.tasya pres.a.

Then after the invocation of Indra and Agni by the “wordsof perfect speech that are loved of the gods”, — for by thosewords the Maruts1 perform the sacrifices as seers who by theirseer-knowledge do well the sacrificial work, ukthebhir hi s.makavayah. suyajna . . . maruto yajanti, — the Rishi next puts intothe mouth of men an exhortation and mutual encouragementto do even as the Fathers and attain the same divine results.“Come now, today let us become perfected in thought, let us de-stroy suffering and unease, let us embrace the higher good,” etonu adya sudhyo bhavama, pra ducchuna minavama a varıyah. ;“far from us let us put always all hostile things (all the things

1 The thought-attaining powers of the Life as will appear hereafter.


that attack and divide, dves.amsi); let us go forward towardsthe Master of the sacrifice. Come, let us create the Thought, Ofriends, (obviously, the seven-headed Angiras-thought), whichis the Mother (Aditi or the Dawn) and removes the screeningpen of the Cow.” The significance is clear enough; it is in suchpassages as these that the inner sense of the Veda half disengagesitself from the veil of the symbol.

Then the Rishi speaks of the great and ancient examplewhich men are called upon to repeat, the example of the An-girases, the achievement of Sarama. “Here the stone was set inmotion whereby the Navagwas chanted the hymn for the tenmonths, Sarama going to the Truth found the cows, the Angirasmade all things true. When in the dawning of this vast One (Usharepresenting the infinite Aditi, mata devanam aditer anıkam) allthe Angirases came together with the cows (or rather, perhaps bythe illuminations represented in the symbol of the cows or Rays);there was the fountain of these (illuminations) in the supremeworld; by the path of the Truth Sarama found the cows.” Herewe see that it is through the movement of Sarama going straightto the Truth by the path of the Truth, that the seven seers,representing the seven-headed or seven-rayed thought of Ayasyaand Brihaspati, find all the concealed illuminations and by forceof these illuminations they all come together, as we have beenalready told by Vasishtha, in the level wideness, samane urve,from which the Dawn has descended with the knowledge (urvadjanatı gat, v. 2) or, as it is here expressed, in the dawning of thisvast One, that is to say, in the infinite consciousness. There,as Vasishtha has said, they, united, agree in knowledge and donot strive together, sangatasah. sam janate na yatante mithaste, that is to say, the seven become as one, as is indicated inanother hymn; they become the one seven-mouthed Angiras, animage corresponding to that of the seven-headed thought, andit is this single unified Angiras who makes all things true as theresult of Sarama’s discovery (verse 7). The harmonised, united,perfected Seer-Will corrects all falsehood and crookedness andturns all thought, life, action into terms of the Truth. In thishymn also the action of Sarama is precisely that of the Intuition


which goes straight to the Truth by the straight path of theTruth and not through the crooked paths of doubt and errorand which delivers the Truth out of the veil of darkness andfalse appearances; it is through the illuminations discovered byher that the Seer-mind can attain to the complete revelation ofthe Truth. The rest of the hymn speaks of the rising of the seven-horsed Sun towards his “field which spreads wide for him at theend of the long journey”, the attainment of the swift Bird to theSoma and of the young Seer to that field of the luminous cows,the Sun’s ascent to the “luminous Ocean”, its crossing over it“like a ship guided by the thinkers” and the descent upon manof the waters of that ocean in response to their call. In thosewaters the sevenfold thought of the Angiras is established bythe human seer. If we remember that the Sun represents thelight of the superconscient or truth-conscious knowledge andthe luminous ocean the realms of the superconscient with theirthrice seven seats of the Mother Aditi, the sense of these symbolicexpressions2 will not be difficult to understand. It is the highestattainment of the supreme goal which follows upon the completeachievement of the Angirases, their united ascent to the plane ofthe Truth, just as that achievement follows upon the discoveryof the herds by Sarama.

Another hymn of great importance in this connection is thethirty-first of the third Mandala, by Vishwamitra. “Agni (theDivine Force) is born quivering with his flame of the offeringfor sacrifice to the great Sons of the Shining One (the Deva,Rudra); great is the child of them, a vast birth; there is a greatmovement of the Driver of the shining steeds (Indra, the DivineMind) by the sacrifices. The conquering (dawns) cleave to himin his struggle, they deliver by knowledge a great light out of thedarkness; knowing the Dawns rise up to him, Indra has becomethe one lord of the luminous cows. The cows who were in thestrong place (of the Panis) the thinkers clove out; by the mind the

2 It is in this sense that we can easily understand many now obscure expressions of theVeda, e.g. VIII.68.9, “May we conquer by thy aid in our battles the great wealth in thewaters and the Sun,” apsu surye mahad dhanam.


seven seers set them moving forward (or upwards towards thesupreme), they found the entire path (goal or field of travel) ofthe Truth; knowing those (supreme seats of the Truth) Indra bythe obeisance entered into them,” vıl.au satır abhi dhıra atr.ndan,praca ahinvan manasa sapta viprah. ; visvam avindan pathyamr.tasya, prajanann it ta namasa vivesa. This is, as usual, the greatbirth, the great light, the great divine movement of the Truth-knowledge with the finding of the goal and the entry of the godsand the seers into the supreme planes above. Next we have thepart of Sarama in this work. “When Sarama found the brokenplace of the hill, he (or perhaps she, Sarama) made continuousthe great and supreme goal. She, the fair-footed, led him tothe front of the imperishable ones (the unslayable cows of theDawn); first she went, knowing, towards their cry.” It is againthe Intuition that leads; knowing, she speeds at once and in frontof all towards the voice of the concealed illuminations, towardsthe place where the hill so firmly formed and impervious inappearance (vıl.u, dr.d.ha) is broken and can admit the seekers.

The rest of the hymn continues to describe the achievementof the Angirases and Indra. “He went, the greatest seer of themall, doing them friendship; the pregnant hill sent forth its con-tents for the doer of perfect works; in the strength of manhood hewith the young (Angirases) seeking plenitude of riches attainedpossession, then singing the hymn of light he became at oncethe Angiras. Becoming in our front the form and measure ofeach existing thing, he knows all the births, he slays Shushna”;that is to say, the Divine Mind assumes a form answering toeach existing thing in the world and reveals its true divine imageand meaning and slays the false force that distorts knowledgeand action. “Seeker of the cows, traveller to the seat of heaven,singing the hymns, he, the Friend, delivers his friends out ofall defect (of right self-expression). With a mind that sought theLight (the cows) they entered their seats by the illumining words,making the path towards Immortality (ni gavyata manasa sedurarkaih. kr.n. vanaso amr.tatvaya gatum). This is that large seat oftheirs, the Truth by which they took possession of the months(the ten months of the Dashagwas). Harmonised in vision (or,


perfectly seeing) they rejoiced in their own (abode, Swar) milkingout the milk of the ancient seed (of things). Their cry (of theWord) heated all the earth and heaven (created, that is to say,the burning clarity, gharma, taptam ghr.tam, which is the yieldof the solar cows); they established in that which was born afirm abiding and in the cows the heroes (that is, the battlingforce was established in the light of the knowledge).

“Indra, the Vritra-slayer, by those who were born (the sonsof the sacrifice), by the offerings, by the hymns of illuminationreleased upward the shining ones; the wide and delightful Cow(the cow Aditi, the vast and blissful higher consciousness) bring-ing for him the sweet food, the honey mixed with the ghr.ta,yielded it as her milk. For this Father also (for Heaven) theyfashioned the vast and shining abode; doers of perfect works,they had the entire vision of it. Wide-upholding by their supportthe Parents (Heaven and Earth) they sat in that high world andembraced all its ecstasy. When for the cleaving away (of evil andfalsehood) the vast Thought holds him immediately increasing inhis pervasion of earth and heaven, — then for Indra in whom arethe equal and faultless words, there are all irresistible energies.He has found the great, manifold and blissful Field (the widefield of the cows, Swar); and he has sent forth together all themoving herd for his friends. Indra shining out by the humansouls (the Angirases) has brought into being, together, the Sun,the Dawn, the Path and the Flame.”

And in the remaining verses the same figures continue, withan intervention of the famous image of the rain which has beenso much misunderstood. “The Ancient-born I make new that Imay conquer. Do thou remove our many undivine hurters and setSwar for our possessing. The purifying rains are extended beforeus (in the shape of the waters); take us over to the state of blissthat is the other shore of them. Warring in thy chariot protectus from the foe; soon, soon make us conquerors of the Cows.The Vritra-slayer, the Master of the Cows, showed (to men) thecows; he has entered with his shining laws (or lustres) withinthose who are black (void of light, like the Panis); showing thetruths (the cows of truth) by the Truth he has opened all his


own doors,” pra sunr.ta disamana r.tena duras ca visva avr.n.odapa svah. ; that is to say, he opens the doors of his own world,Swar, after breaking open by his entry into our darkness (antah.kr.s.n. an gat) the “human doors” kept closed by the Panis.

Such is this remarkable hymn, the bulk of which I havetranslated because it both brings into striking relief the mysticand entirely psychological character of the Vedic poetry and byso doing sets out vividly the nature of the imagery in the midst ofwhich Sarama figures. The other references to Sarama in the RigVeda do not add anything essential to the conception. We havea brief allusion in IV.16.8, “When thou didst tear the watersout of the hill, Sarama became manifest before thee; so do thouas our leader tear out much wealth for us, breaking the pens,hymned by the Angirases.” It is the Intuition manifesting beforethe Divine Mind as its forerunner when there is the emergenceof the waters, the streaming movements of the Truth that breakout of the hill in which they were confined by Vritra (verse 7);and it is by means of the Intuition that this godhead becomesour leader to the rescue of the Light and the conquest of themuch wealth hidden within in the rock behind the fortress gatesof the Panis.

We find another allusion to Sarama in a hymn by ParasharaShaktya, I.72. This is one of the Suktas which most clearly revealthe sense of the Vedic imagery, like most indeed of the hymnsof Parashara, a very luminous poet who loves always to throwback something more than a corner of the mystic’s veil. It isbrief and I shall translate it in full. “He has created, within,the seer-knowings of the eternal Disposer of things, holding inhis hand many powers (powers of the divine Purushas, naryapurun. i); Agni creating together all immortalities becomes themaster of the (divine) riches. All the immortals, they who arenot limited (by ignorance), desiring, found him in us as if theCalf (of the cow Aditi) existing everywhere; labouring, travellingto the Seat, holding the Thought they attained in the supremeseat to the shining (glory) of Agni. O Agni, when through thethree years (three symbolic seasons or periods correspondingperhaps to the passage through the three mental heavens) they,


pure, had served thee, the pure one, with the ghr.ta, they held thesacrificial names and set moving (to the supreme heaven) formswell born. They had knowledge of the vast heaven and earthand bore them forward, they the sons of Rudra, the lords of thesacrifice; the mortal awoke to vision and found Agni standingin the seat supreme. Knowing perfectly (or in harmony) theykneeled down to him; they with their wives (the female energiesof the gods) bowed down to him who is worthy of obeisance;purifying themselves (or, perhaps, exceeding the limits of heavenand earth) they created their own (their proper or divine) forms,guarded in the gaze, each friend, of the Friend. In thee the godsof the sacrifice found the thrice seven secret seats hidden within;they, being of one heart, protect by them the immortality. Guardthou the herds that stand and that which moves. O Agni, havingknowledge of all manifestations (or births) in the worlds (or,knowing all the knowledge of the peoples) establish thy forces,continuous, for life. Knowing, within, the paths of the journey-ing of the gods thou becamest their sleepless messenger and thebearer of the offerings. The seven mighty ones of heaven (therivers) placing aright the thought, knowing the Truth, discernedthe doors of the felicity; Sarama found the fastness, the wide-ness of the cows whereby now the human creature enjoys (thesupreme riches). They who entered upon all things that bearright issue, made the path to Immortality; by the great ones andby the greatness earth stood wide; the mother Aditi with hersons came for the upholding. The Immortals planted in him theshining glory, when they made the two eyes of heaven (identicalprobably with the two vision-powers of the Sun, the two horsesof Indra); rivers, as it were, flow down released; the shining ones(the cows) who were here below knew, O Agni.”

So runs this hymn of Parashara, translated with the utmostpossible literalness even at the cost of some uncouthness in theEnglish. It is clear at the very first glance that it is throughouta hymn of knowledge, of the Truth, of a divine Flame which ishardly distinguishable from the supreme Deity, of immortality,of the ascent of the gods, the divine powers, by the sacrifice totheir godhead, to their supreme names, to their proper forms, to


the shining glory of the supreme state with its thrice seven seatsof the Godhead. Such an ascent can have no other meaningthan the ascent of the divine powers in man out of their ordi-nary cosmic appearances to the shining Truth beyond, as indeedParashara himself tells us that by this action of the gods mortalman awakens to the knowledge and finds Agni standing in thesupreme seat and goal; vidan marto nemadhita cikitvan, agnimpade parame tasthivamsam. What is Sarama doing in such ahymn if she is not a power of the Truth, if her cows are not therays of a divine dawn of illumination? What have the cows of oldwarring tribes and the sanguinary squabbles of our Aryan andDravidian ancestors over their mutual plunderings and cattle-liftings to do with this luminous apocalypse of the immortalityand the godhead? Or what are these rivers that think and knowthe Truth and discover the hidden doors? Or must we still saythat these were the rivers of the Punjab dammed up by droughtor by the Dravidians and Sarama a mythological figure for anAryan embassy or else only the physical Dawn?

One hymn in the tenth Mandala is devoted entirely to this“embassy” of Sarama, it is the colloquy of Sarama and the Panis;but it adds nothing essential to what we already know about herand its chief importance lies in the help it gives us in formingour conception of the masters of the cavern treasure. We maynote, however, that neither in this hymn, nor in the others wehave noticed is there the least indication of the figure of thedivine hound which was attributed to Sarama in a possibly laterdevelopment of the Vedic imagery. It is surely the shining fair-footed goddess by whom the Panis are attracted and whom theydesire as their sister, — not as a dog to guard their cattle, but asone who will share in the possession of their riches. The imageof the hound of heaven is, however, exceedingly apt and strikingand was bound to develop out of the legend. In one of the earlierhymns we have mention indeed of a son for whom Sarama “gotfood” according to an ancient interpretation which accounts forthe phrase by a story that the hound Sarama demanded foodfor her offspring in the sacrifice as a condition of her searchfor the lost cows. But this is obviously an explanatory invention


which finds no place in the Rig Veda itself. The Veda says, “In thesacrifice” or, as it more probably means, “in the seeking of Indraand the Angirases (for the cows) Sarama discovered a foundationfor the Son,” vidat sarama tanayaya dhasim (I.62.3); for suchis the more likely sense here of the word dhasim. The son is inall probability the son born of the sacrifice, a constant elementin the Vedic imagery and not the dog-race born of Sarama.We have similar phrases in the Veda as in I.96.4, matarisvapuruvarapus.t.ir vidad gatum tanayaya svarvit, “Matarishwan(the Life-god, Vayu) increasing the many desirable things (thehigher objects of life) discovered the path for the Son, discoveredSwar,” where the subject is evidently the same but the son hasnothing to do with any brood of puppies.

The two Sarameya dogs, messengers of Yama, are men-tioned in a late hymn in the tenth Mandala, but without anyreference to Sarama as their mother. This occurs in the famous“funeral” hymn X.14, and it is worth while noting the realcharacter of Yama and his two dogs in the Rig Veda. In thelater ideas Yama is the god of Death and has his own specialworld; but in the Rig Veda he seems to have been originally aform of the Sun, — even as late as the Isha Upanishad we findthe name used as an appellation of the Sun, — and then oneof the twin children of the wide-shining Lord of Truth. He isthe guardian of the dharma, the law of the Truth, satyadharma,which is a condition of immortality, and therefore himself theguardian of immortality. His world is Swar, the world of im-mortality, amr.te loke aks.ite, where, as we are told in IX.113, isthe indestructible Light, where Swar is established, yatra jyotirajasram, yasmin loke svar hitam. The hymn X.14 is indeed nota hymn of Death so much as a hymn of Life and Immortality.Yama and the ancient Fathers have discovered the path to thatworld which is a pasture of the Cows whence the enemy cannotbear away the radiant herds, yamo no gatum prathamo viveda,nais.a gavyutir apabhartava u, yatra nah. purve pitarah. pareyuh. .The soul of the heaven-ascending mortal is bidden to “outrunthe two four-eyed varicoloured Sarameya dogs on the good (oreffective) path.” Of that path to heaven they are the four-eyed


guardians, protecting man on the road by their divine vision, yaute svanau yama raks.itarau caturaks.au pathiraks.ı nr.caks.asau,and Yama is asked to give them as an escort to the soul onits way. These dogs are “wide-moving, not easily satisfied” andrange as the messengers of the Lord of the Law among men.And the hymn prays, “May they (the dogs) give us back blisshere in the unhappy (world) so that we may look upon the Sun.”We are still in the order of the old Vedic ideas, the Light andthe Bliss and the Immortality, and these Sarameya dogs have theessential characteristics of Sarama, the vision, the wide-rangingmovement, the power to travel on the path by which the goal isreached. Sarama leads to the wideness of the cows; these dogsprotect the soul on its journey to the inviolable pasture, the field(ks.etra) of the luminous and imperishable herds. Sarama bringsus to the truth, to the sun-vision which is the way to the bliss;these dogs bring the weal to man in this world of suffering sothat he shall have the vision of the Sun. Whether Sarama figuresas the fair-footed goddess speeding on the path or the heavenlyhound, mother of these wide-ranging guardians of the path, theidea is the same, a power of the Truth that seeks and discovers,that finds by a divine faculty of insight the hidden Light and thedenied Immortality. But it is to this seeking and finding that herfunction is limited.

Chapter XXI

The Sons of Darkness

WE HAVE seen, not once but repeatedly, that it is im-possible to read into the story of the Angirases, Indraand Sarama, the cave of the Panis and the conquest of

the Dawn, the Sun and the Cows an account of a political andmilitary struggle between Aryan invaders and Dravidian cave-dwellers. It is a struggle between the seekers of Light and thepowers of Darkness; the cows are the illuminations of the Sunand the Dawn, they cannot be physical cows; the wide fear-free field of the Cows won by Indra for the Aryans is the wideworld of Swar, the world of the solar Illumination, the threefoldluminous regions of Heaven. Therefore equally the Panis mustbe taken as powers of the cave of Darkness. It is quite true thatthe Panis are Dasyus or Dasas; they are spoken of constantly bythat name, they are described as the Dasa Varna as opposed tothe Arya Varna, and varn. a, colour, is the word used for casteor class in the Brahmanas and later writings, although it doesnot therefore follow that it has that sense in the Rig Veda. TheDasyus are the haters of the sacred word; they are those who givenot to the gods the gift or the holy wine, who keep their wealthof cows and horses and other treasure for themselves and do notgive them to the seers; they are those who do not the sacrifice.We may, if we like, suppose that there was a struggle betweentwo different cults in India and that the Rishis took their imagesfrom the physical struggle between the human representatives ofthese cults and applied them to the spiritual conflict, just as theyemployed the other details of their physical life to symbolise thespiritual sacrifice, the spiritual wealth, the spiritual battle andjourney. But it is perfectly certain that in the Rig Veda at least itis the spiritual conflict and victory, not the physical battle andplunder of which they are speaking.

It is either an uncritical or a disingenuous method to take


isolated passages and give them a particular sense which will dowell enough there only while ignoring the numerous other pas-sages in which that sense is patently inapplicable. We must takeas a whole all the references in the Veda to the Panis, their wealth,their characteristics, the victory of the Gods, the seers and theAryans over them and adopt uniformly that conclusion whicharises from all the passages thus taken together. When we followthis method we find that in many of these passages the idea of thePanis as human beings is absolutely impossible and that they arepowers either of physical or of spiritual darkness; in others thatthey cannot at all be powers of physical darkness, but may wellbe either human enemies of the god-seekers and sacrificers orelse enemies of the spiritual Light; in yet others that they cannotbe either human enemies or enemies of the physical Light, butare certainly the enemies of the spiritual Light, the Truth andthe Thought. From these data there can be only one conclusion,that they are always and only enemies of the spiritual Light.

We may take as the master-clue to the general characterof these Dasyus the Rik V.14.4, “Agni born shone out slayingthe Dasyus, the darkness by the Light; he found the Cows, theWaters, Swar,” agnir jato arocata, ghnan dasyun jyotis.a tamah. ;avindad ga apah. svah. . There are two great divisions of theDasyus, the Panis who intercept both the cows and the watersbut are especially associated with the refusal of the cows, theVritras who intercept the waters and the light, but are especiallyassociated with the withholding of the waters; all Dasyus with-out exception stand in the way of the ascent to Swar and opposethe acquisition of the wealth by the Aryan seers. The refusalof the light is their opposition to the vision of Swar, svardr.s,and the vision of the sun, to the supreme vision of knowledge,upama ketuh. ; the refusal of the waters is their opposition to theabundant movement of Swar, svarvatır apah. , the movement orstreamings of the Truth, r.tasya pres.a, r.tasya dharah. ; the oppo-sition to the wealth-acquisition is their refusal of the abundantsubstance of Swar, vasu, dhana, vaja, hiran. ya, that great wealthwhich is found in the sun and in the waters, apsu surye mahaddhanam. Still since the whole struggle is between the Light and

The Sons of Darkness 225

the Darkness, the Truth and the Falsehood, the divine Mayaand the undivine, all the Dasyus alike are here identified withthe Darkness; and it is by the birth and shining of Agni thatthe Light is created with which he slays the Dasyus and theDarkness. The historical interpretation will not do at all here,though the naturalistic may pass if we isolate the passage andsuppose the lighting of the sacrificial fire to be the cause of thedaily sunrise; but we have to judge from a comparative study ofthe Veda and not on the strength of isolated passages.

The opposition between the Aryans and the Panis or Dasyusis brought out in another hymn of the fifth Mandala and in III.34we have the expression Arya Varna. We must remember that theDasyus have been identified with the Darkness; therefore theAryans must be connected with the Light and we actually findthat the light of the Sun is called in the Veda the Aryan Light incontradistinction evidently to the Dasa darkness. Vasishtha alsospeaks of the three Aryan peoples who are jyotiragrah. , led bythe light, having the light in their front (VII.33.7). The Aryan-Dasyu question can only be adequately treated by an exhaustivediscussion in which all the relevant passages are scrutinised andthe difficulties faced, but for my present purpose this is a suf-ficient starting-point. We must remember also that we have inthe Veda the expressions r.tam jyotih. , hiran. yam jyotih. , the truelight, the golden light, which give us an additional clue. Nowthese three epithets of the solar light, arya, r.ta, hiran. ya are, Isuggest, mutually illuminative and almost equivalent. The Sunis the Lord of Truth, therefore its light is the r.tam jyotih. ; thislight of truth is that which the Aryan, god or mortal, possesses,and which constitutes his Arya-hood; again the epithet goldenis constantly applied to the Sun and gold is in Veda probablythe symbol of the substance of the truth, for its substance is thelight which is the golden wealth found in Surya and in the watersof Swar, apsu surye, — therefore we have the epithet hiran. yamjyotih. . This golden or shining light is the hue, varn. a, of the truth;it is also the hue of the thoughts full of that illumination won bythe Aryan, the cows who are bright in colour, sukra, sveta, thecolour of Light; while the Dasyu, being a power of darkness, is


black in hue. I suggest that the brightness of the light of the truth,jyotih. aryam, is the Arya varn. a, the hue of these Aryans whoare jyotiragrah. ; the darkness of the night of the ignorance is thehue of the Panis, the Dasa varn. a. In this way varn. a would cometo mean almost the nature or else all those of that particularnature, the colour being the symbol of the nature; and that thisidea was a current notion among the ancient Aryans seems to meto be shown by the later use of different colours to distinguishthe four castes, white, red, yellow and black.

The passage in V.34 runs as follows. “He (Indra) desiresnot to ascend by the five and by the ten; he cleaves not to himwho gives not the Soma even though he grow and increase; heovercomes him or else he slays in his impetuous movement; hegives to the god-seeker for his enjoyment the pen full of theCows. Cleaver (of the foe) in the battle-shock, firm holder ofthe discus (or the wheel), averse from him who gives not theSoma but increaser of the Soma-giver, terrible is Indra and thetamer of all; Aryan, he brings into utter subjection the Dasa.He comes driving this enjoyment of the Pani, robbing him ofit, and he apportions entirely to the giver for his enjoymentthe wealth rich in hero-powers (lit. in men, sunaram vasu, vıraand nr. being often used synonymously); that man who makeswroth the strength of Indra is held back manifoldly in a difficultjourneying, (durge1 cana dhriyate a puru). When Maghavan hasknown in the shining cows the Two who are rich in wealthand have all forces, he growing in knowledge makes a third hishelper and rushing impetuously looses upward the multitude ofthe cows (gavyam) by the help of his fighters.” And the last Rikof the Sukta speaks of the Aryan (god or man) arriving at thehighest knowledge-vision (upamam ketum aryah. ), the watersin their meeting nourishing him and his housing a strong andbrilliant force of battle, ks.atram amavat tves.am.

From what we already know of these symbols we can easily

1 The Rishis pray always to the gods to make their path to the highest bliss easy ofgoing and thornless, suga; durga is the opposite of this easy going, it is the path besetby manifold (puru) dangers and sufferings and difficulties.


grasp the inner sense of the hymn. Indra, the Divine Mind-Powertakes their secret wealth from the powers of the Ignorance withwhom he refuses to ally himself even when they are rich andprosper; he gives the imprisoned herds of the illumined Dawn tothe man of the sacrifice who desires the godheads. He is himselfthe Aryan who brings the life of the ignorance into completesubjection to the higher life so that it yields up to it all thewealth it holds. The use of the words arya and arya to signifythe gods, not only in this but in other passages, tends to showin itself that the opposition of Arya and Dasyu is not at all anational or tribal or merely human distinction, but has a deepersignificance. The fighters are certainly the seven Angirases; forthey and not the Maruts, which is Sayana’s interpretation ofsatvabhih. , are Indra’s helpers in the release of the Cows. But thethree persons whom Indra finds or comes to know by enteringamong the bright cows, by possessing the trooping illuminationsof the Thought, are more difficult to fix. In all probability it isthese three by whom the seven rays of the Angiras-knowledgeare raised to ten so that they pass successfully through the tenmonths and release the sun and the cows; for it is after finding orknowing the two and getting help of the third that Indra releasesthe cows of the Panis. They may also be connected with the sym-bolism of the three Aryan peoples led by the light and the threeluminous worlds of Swar; for the attainment of the supremeknowledge-vision, upama ketuh. , is the final result of their actionand this supreme knowledge is that which has the vision of Swarand stands in its three luminous worlds, rocanani, as we findin III.2.14, svardr.sam ketum divo rocanastham us.arbudham,“the knowledge-vision that sees Swar, that stands in the shiningworlds, that awakes in the dawn.”

In III.34 Vishwamitra gives us the expression arya varn.a andat the same time the key to its psychological significance. Threeverses of the hymn (8-10) run as follows: “(They hymn) thesupremely desirable, the ever overcoming, the giver of strengthwho wins possession of Swar and the divine waters; the thinkershave joy in the wake of Indra who takes possession of the earthand the heaven. Indra wins possession of the Steeds, wins the


Sun, wins the Cow of the many enjoyments; he wins the goldenenjoyment, having slain the Dasyus he fosters (or protects) theAryan varn. a; Indra wins the herbs and the days, the trees andthe mid-world; he pierces Vala and impels forward the speakerof the words; so he becomes the tamer of those who set againsthim their will in works, (abhikratunam).” We have here thesymbolic elements of all the wealth won by Indra for the Aryan,and it includes the Sun, the days, the earth, the heavens, themiddle world, the horses, the growths of earth, herbs and trees(vanaspatın in the double sense, lords of the forest and lordsof enjoyment); and we have as against Vala and his Dasyus theAryan varn.a.

But in the verses that precede (4-6) we have already the wordvarn. a as the hue of the Aryan thoughts, the thoughts that are trueand full of light. “Indra, Swar-conquering, bringing to birth thedays assailed and conquered by the desirers (the Angirases) thesearmies (of the Dasyus); he made to shine for man the knowledge-vision of the days (ketum ahnam), he found the Light for the vastenjoyment; . . . he made conscious in knowledge these thoughtsfor his adorer, he carried forward (beyond the obstruction of theDasyus) this bright varn. a of these (thoughts), acetayad dhiyaima jaritre, pra imam varn. am atirac chukram asam. They setin action (or, praise) many great and perfect works of the greatIndra; by his strength he crushes, in his overwhelming energy, byhis workings of knowledge (mayabhih. ) the crooked Dasyus.”

We find here the Vedic phrase ketum ahnam, the knowledge-vision of the days, by which is meant the light of the Sun ofTruth that leads to the vast beatitude; for the “days” are thoseproduced through Indra’s conquest of Swar for man followingas we know upon his destruction of the Pani armies with thehelp of the Angirases and the ascent of the Sun and the shiningCows. It is for man and as powers of man that all this is done bythe gods, not on their own account since they possess already;— for him that as the Nr., the divine Man or Purusha, Indraholds many strengths of that manhood, nr.vad . . . narya purun. i;him he awakes to the knowledge of these thoughts which aresymbolised as the shining cows released from the Panis; and the


shining hue of these thoughts, sukram varn. am asam, is evidentlythe same as that sukra or sveta Aryan hue which is mentionedin verse 9. Indra carries forward or increases the “colour” ofthese thoughts beyond the opposition of the Panis, pra varn. amatirac chukram; in doing so he slays the Dasyus and protectsor fosters and increases the Aryan “colour”, hatvı dasyun praaryam varn.am avat. Moreover these Dasyus are the crookedones, vr.jinan, and are conquered by Indra’s works or forms ofknowledge, his “maya”s by which, as we are elsewhere told,he overcomes the opposing “maya”s of the Dasyus, Vritra orVala. The straight and the crooked are constantly synonymousin Veda with the truth and the falsehood. Therefore it is clearthat these Pani Dasyus are crooked powers of the falsehood andignorance who set their false knowledge, their false strength,will and works against the true knowledge, the true strength,will and works of the gods and the Aryans. The triumph of theLight is the triumph of the divine knowledge of the Truth againstthe darkness of this false or demoniac knowledge; that victoryis the ascent of the Sun, the birth of the Days, the advent ofthe Dawn, the release of the herds of the shining Rays and theirmounting to the world of Light.

That the cows are the thoughts of the Truth we are toldclearly enough in IX.111, a hymn to Soma. “By this brilliantlight he, purifying himself, breaks through all hostile powers byhis self-yoked horses, as if by the self-yoked horses of the Sun.He shines, a stream of the outpressed Soma, purifying himself,luminous, the brilliant One, when he encompasses all forms (ofthings) with the speakers of the Rik, with the seven-mouthedspeakers of the Rik (the Angiras powers). Thou, O Soma findestthat wealth of the Panis; thou by the Mothers (the cows of thePanis, frequently so designed in other hymns) makest thyselfbright in thy own home (Swar), by the thoughts of the Truth inthy home, sam matr.bhir marjayasi sva a dama r.tasya dhıtibhirdame. As if the Sama (equal fulfilment, samane urve, in thelevel wideness) of the higher world (paravatah. ), is that (Swar)where the thoughts (of the Truth) take their delight. By thoseshining ones of the triple world (or triple elemental nature) he


holds the wide manifestation (of knowledge), shining he holdsthe wide manifestation.” We see that these cows of the Panisby whom Soma becomes clear and bright in his own home, thehome of Agni and the other gods, which we know to be thevast Truth of Swar, r.tam br.hat, these shining cows who havein them the triple nature of the supreme world, tridhatubhirarus.ıbhir, and by whom Soma holds the birth or wide manifes-tation of that Truth,2 are the thoughts which realise the Truth.This Swar with its three shining worlds in whose wideness thereis the equal fulfilment of the tridhatu, a phrase often used forthe supreme triple principle forming the triune highest world,tisrah. paravatah. , is elsewhere described as the wide and fear-freepasture in which the Cows range at will and take their delight(ran. ayanti) and here too it is that region where the thoughts ofthe Truth take their delight, yatra ran. anti dhıtayah. . And it issaid in the next verse that the divine chariot of Soma follows,getting knowledge, the supreme direction and labours forward,having vision, by the rays, purvam anu pradisam yati cekitat,sam rasmibhir yatate darsato ratho daivyo darsato rathah. . Thissupreme direction is evidently that of the divine or vast Truth;these rays are evidently the rays of the Dawn or Sun of Truth;they are the cows concealed by the Panis, the illumined thoughts,dhiyah. of the bright hue, r.tasya dhıtayah. .

All the internal evidence of the Veda wherever this imageof the Panis, the Cows, the Angirases occurs establishes invari-ably the same conclusion. The Panis are the withholders of thethoughts of the Truth, dwellers in the darkness without knowl-edge (tamo avayunam) which Indra and the Angirases by theWord, by the Sun replace with Light to manifest in its stead thewideness of the Truth. It is not with physical weapons but withwords that Indra fights the Panis (VI.39.2), pan. ın vacobhir abhiyodhad indrah. . It will be enough to translate without comment

2 Vayah. . Cf. VI.21.2-3, where it is said that Indra who has the knowledge and whoupholds our words and is by the words increased in the sacrifice, indram yo vidanogirvahasam gırbhir yajnavr.ddham, forms by the Sun into that which has manifestation ofknowledge the darkness which had extended itself and in which there was no knowledge,sa it tamo avayunam tatanvat suryen.a vayunavac cakara.


the hymn in which this phrase occurs so as to show finally thenature of this symbolism. “Of this divine and rapturous seer(Soma), bearer of the sacrifice, this honeyed speaker with theillumined thought, O god, join to us, to the speaker of the wordthe impulsions that are led by the cows of light (is.o goagrah. ).He it was who desired the shining ones (the cows, usrah. ) allabout the hill, truth-yoked, yoking his car with the thoughts ofthe Truth, r.tadhıtibhir r.tayug yujanah. ; (then) Indra broke theunbroken hill-level of Vala, by the words he fought against thePanis. He it was (Soma) who as the Moon-Power (Indu) day andnight and through the years made the lightless nights to shineout, and they held the vision of the days; he created the dawnspure in their birth. He it was becoming luminous who made fullof light the lightless ones; he made the many (dawns) shine by theTruth, he went with horses yoked by the Truth, with the wheelthat finds Swar, satisfying (with the wealth) the doer of works.”It is always the thought, the Truth, the word that is associatedwith the Cows of the Panis; by the words of Indra the DivineMind-Power those who withhold the cows are conquered; thatwhich was dark becomes light; the chariot drawn by the horsesyoked by the Truth finds (by knowledge, svarvida nabhina) theluminous vastnesses of being and consciousness and delight nowconcealed from our vision. “By the brahma Indra pierces Vala,conceals the darkness, makes Swar visible” (II.24.3), ud ga ajadabhinad brahman. a valam aguhat tamo vyacaks.ayat svah. .

The whole Rig Veda is a triumph-chant of the powers ofLight, and their ascent by the force and vision of the Truthto its possession in its source and seat where it is free from theattack of the falsehood. “By Truth the cows (illumined thoughts)enter into the Truth; labouring towards the Truth the Truth oneconquers; the aggressive force of the Truth seeks the cows ofLight and goes breaking through (the enemy); for Truth the twowide ones (Heaven and Earth) become multitudinous and deep,for Truth the two supreme Mothers give their yield,” r.tena gavar.tam a vivesuh. ; r.tam yemana r.tam id vanoti, r.tasya sus.mas tu-raya u gavyuh. ; r.taya pr.thvı bahule gabhıre, r.taya dhenu parameduhate (IV.23.9-10).

Chapter XXII

The Conquest over the Dasyus

THE DASYUS stand in opposition to both the Aryan godsand the Aryan seers. The Gods are born from Aditi in thesupreme Truth of things, the Dasyus or Danavas from

Diti in the nether darkness; they are the Lords of Light andthe Lords of Night fronting each other across the triple worldof earth, heaven and mid-air, body, mind and the connectingbreath of life. Sarama in X.108 descends from the supremerealm, parakat; she has to cross the waters of the Rasa, she meetsthe night which gives place to her for fear of her overleaping it,atis.kado bhiyasa; she arrives at the home of the Dasyus, dasyoroko na sadanam, which they themselves describe as the rekupadam alakam, the world of falsehood beyond the bound ofthings. The supreme world also surpasses the bound of thingsby exceeding or transcending it; it is reku padam, but satyam notalakam, the world of the Truth, not the world of the falsehood.The latter is the darkness without knowledge, tamo avayunamtatanvat; Indra when his largeness exceeds (ririce) heaven andearth and mid-world creates for the Aryan the opposite worldof truth and knowledge, vayunavat, which exceeds these threedomains and is therefore reku padam. This darkness, this lowerworld of Night and the Inconscient in the formed existence ofthings symbolised in the image of the mountain which rises fromthe bowels of earth to the back of heaven, is represented by thesecret cave at the base of the hill, the cave of the darkness.

But the cave is only the home of the Panis, their field ofaction is earth and heaven and the mid-world. They are the sonsof the Inconscience, but themselves are not precisely inconscientin their action; they have forms of apparent knowledge, mayah. ,but these are forms of ignorance the truth of which is concealedin the darkness of the inconscient and their surface or front isfalsehood, not truth. For the world as we see it has come out

The Conquest over the Dasyus 233

of the darkness concealed in darkness, the deep and abysmalflood that covered all things, the inconscient ocean, apraketamsalilam (X.129.3); in that non-existence the seers have found bydesire in the heart and thought in the mind that which buildsup the true existence. This non-existence of the truth of things,asat, is the first aspect of them that emerges from the inconscientocean; and its great darkness is the Vedic Night, ratrım jagatonivesanım (I.35.1), which holds the world and all its unrevealedpotentialities in her obscure bosom. Night extends her realmover this triple world of ours and out of her in heaven, in themental being, Dawn is born who delivers the Sun out of thedarkness where it was lying concealed and eclipsed and createsthe vision of the supreme Day in the non-existence, in the Night,asati ketum. It is therefore in these three realms that the battlebetween the Lords of Light and the Lords of the Ignoranceproceeds through its continual vicissitudes.

The word pan. i means dealer, trafficker, from pan. (also pan,1

cf. Tamil pan. , Greek ponos, labour) and we may perhaps regardthe Panis as the powers that preside over those ordinary unil-lumined sense-activities of life whose immediate root is in thedark subconscient physical being and not in the divine mind. Thewhole struggle of man is to replace this action by the luminousworking of mind and life which comes from above through themental existence. Whoever thus aspires, labours, battles, travels,ascends the hill of being is the Aryan (arya, arya, ari with thevarious senses, to toil, to fight, to climb or rise, to travel, toprepare the sacrifice); for the work of the Aryan is a sacrificewhich is at once a battle and an ascent and a journey, a battleagainst the powers of darkness, an ascent to the highest peaksof the mountain beyond earth and heaven into Swar, a journeyto the other shore of the rivers and the ocean into the farthestInfinity of things. The Aryan has the will to the work, he is thedoer of the work (karu, kıri, etc.), the gods who put their force

1 Sayana takes pan in Veda — to praise, but in one place he admits the sense ofvyavahara, dealing. Action seems to me to be its sense in most passages. From pan.in the sense of action we have the earlier names of the organs of action, pan. i, hand, footor hoof, Lat. penis, cf. also payu.


into his work are sukratu, perfect in power for the sacrifice; theDasyu or Pani is the opposite of both, he is akratu. The Aryanis the sacrificer, yajamana, yajyu; the gods who receive, uphold,impel his sacrifice are yajata, yajatra, powers of the sacrifice; theDasyu is the opposite of both, he is ayajyu. The Aryan in the sac-rifice finds the divine word, gıh. , mantra, brahma, uktha, he is thebrahma or singer of the word; the gods delight in and uphold theword, girvahas, girvan. as, the Dasyus are haters and destroyersof the Word, brahmadvis.ah. , spoilers of speech, mr.dhravacah. .They have no force of the divine breath or no mouth to speak it,they are anasah. ; and they have no power to think and mentalisethe word and the truth it contains, they are amanyamanah. : butthe Aryans are the thinkers of the word, manyamanah. , hold-ers of the thought, the thought-mind and the seer-knowledge,dhıra, manıs.ı, kavi; the gods are also the supreme thinkers of theThought, prathamo manota dhiyah. , kavayah. . The Aryans aredesirers of the godheads, devayu, usij; they seek to increase theirown being and the godheads in them by the sacrifice, the word,the thought; the Dasyus are god-haters, devadvis.ah. , obstructorsof the godhead, devanidah. , who desire no increase, avr.dhah. .The gods lavish wealth on the Aryan, the Aryan gives his wealthto the gods; the Dasyu withholds his wealth from the Aryanuntil it is taken from him by force, and does not press out theimmortal Soma wine for the deities who seek its rapture in man;although he is revan, although his cave is packed with cows andhorses and treasures, gobhir asvebhir vasubhir nyr.s.t.am, still heis aradhas, because his wealth gives no prosperity or felicity toman or himself, — the Pani is the miser of existence. And in thestruggle between the Aryan and the Dasyu he seeks always toplunder and destroy, to steal the luminous cows of the latter andhide them again in the darkness of the cave. “Slay the devourer,the Pani; for he is the wolf (the tearer, vr.kah. )” (VI.51.14).

It is evident that these descriptions could easily be appliedto human enemies who hate the cult and the gods of the Aryan,but we shall see that such an interpretation is entirely impossiblebecause in the hymn I.33 in which these distinctions are mostclearly drawn and the battle of Indra and his human allies with


the Dasyus most elaborately described, these Dasyus, Panis andVritras, cannot possibly be human fighters, tribes or robbers. Inthis hymn of Hiranyastupa Angirasa the first ten verses clearlyrefer to the battle for the Cows and therefore to the Panis.“Come, let us go seeking the cows to Indra; for it is he thatincreases the thought in us; invincible is he and complete arehis felicities, he releases for us (separates from the darkness) thesupreme knowledge-vision of the luminous cows, gavam ketamparam avarjate nah. . I fly to the unassailable giver of riches like abird to its beloved nest, bowing down to Indra with the supremewords of light, to him to whom his affirmers must call in theirjourney. He comes with all his armies and has fastened firmlyhis quivers; he is the fighter (the Aryan) who brings the cowsto whomsoever he desires. O Indra who hast increased (by ourword), hold not back for thyself thy much delight, become not inus the Pani, cos.kuyaman. o bhuri vamam ma pan. ir bhur asmadadhi pravr.ddha.” The last phrase is a striking one and in thecurrent interpretation its real force is avoided by rendering “donot become a miser with regard to us.” But this is to ignore thefact that the Panis are the withholders of the wealth who keepit for themselves and give it neither to god nor man. The senseobviously is “Having thy much wealth of the delight, do not bea Pani, one who holds his possessions only for himself and keepsthem from man; do not hold the delight away from us in thysuperconscient as the Panis do in their subconscient secrecy.”

Then the hymn describes the Pani, the Dasyu and Indra’sbattle with him for the possession of earth and heaven. “Nay,thou slayest with thy weapon the wealthy Dasyu, ranging alonewith thy powers that serve thee, O Indra; they on thy bow (thepowers as arrows) sped diversely in all directions and they whokeep possession and sacrifice not went unto their death. Theirheads were scattered far from them, they who do not sacrifice yetstrove with the sacrificers, when, O lord of the shining steeds, Ostrong stander in heaven, thou didst cast out from Heaven andEarth those who observe not the law of thy working (avratan).They fought against the army of the blameless one; the Nava-gwas set him on his march; like bullocks who fight against the


bull they were cast out, they came to know what was Indraand fled from him down the slopes. O Indra, thou foughtestthem who laughed and wept on the other side of the mid-world(rajasah. pare, i.e. on the borders of heaven); thou didst burndown the Dasyu out of heaven from on high, thou didst foster theexpression of him who affirms thee and gives the Soma. Makingthe circle of the earth, they shone in the light of the golden gem(an image for the Sun); but for all their rushing they could notpass beyond Indra, for he set spies all around by the Sun. Whenthou possessedst earth and heaven all around with thy vastness,O Indra, by the speakers of the word (brahmabhir) thou didstcast out the Dasyu, attacking those who can think not (theTruth) by those who think, amanyamanan abhi manyamanaih. .They attained not to the end of heaven and earth; Indra, thebull, made the lightning his helper, by the Light he milked theshining cows out of the darkness.”

The battle takes place not on earth but on the other shoreof the Antariksha, the Dasyus are driven out of heaven by theflames of the thunderbolt, they circle round the earth and are castout of both heaven and earth; for they can find no place in eitherheaven or earth, all being now full of the greatness of Indra, norcan conceal themselves anywhere from his lightnings becausethe Sun with its rays gives him spies whom he sets all roundand in the brightness of those rays the Panis are discovered.This can be no description of an earthly battle between Aryanand Dravidian tribes; neither can the lightning be the physicallightning since that has nothing to do with the destruction of thepowers of Night and the milking of the cows of the Dawn outof the darkness. It is clear then that these non-sacrificers, thesehaters of the word who are incompetent even to think it are notany human enemies of the Aryan cult. They are the powers thatstrive for possession of heaven and earth in man himself; theyare demons and not Dravidians.

It is noteworthy that they strive, but fail to attain the “limitof earth and heaven”; we may suppose that these powers seekwithout the word or the sacrifice to attain to the higher worldbeyond earth and heaven which can be conquered only by the


word and the sacrifice. They seek to possess the Truth underthe law of the Ignorance; but they are unable to attain to thelimit of earth or heaven; only Indra and the Gods can so exceedthe formula of mind, life and body after filling all three withtheir greatness. Sarama (X.108.6) seems to hint at this ambitionof the Panis; “May your words be unable to attain, may yourembodiments be evil and inauspicious; may you not violate thepath to travel upon it; may Brihaspati not give you happinessof the two worlds (divine and human).” The Panis indeed offerinsolently to be friendly with Indra if he will stay in their cave andbe the keeper of their cows, to which Sarama answers that Indrais the overcomer of all and cannot be himself overcome and op-pressed, and again they offer brotherhood to Sarama if she willdwell with them and not return to the far world whence she hascome by the force of the gods against all obstacles, prabadhitasahasa daivyena. Sarama replies, “I know not brotherhood andsisterhood, Indra knows and the dread Angirases; desiring theCows they protected me so that I came; depart hence, O Panis,to a better place. Depart hence, O Panis, to a better place, letthe Cows ye confine go upward by the Truth, the hidden Cowswhom Brihaspati finds and Soma and the pressing-stones andthe illumined seers.”

We have the idea also of a voluntary yielding up of theirstore by the Panis in VI.53, a hymn addressed to the Sun asthe Increaser Pushan. “O Pushan, Lord of the Path, we yokethee like a chariot for the winning of the plenitude, for theThought. . . . O shining Pushan, impel to giving the Pani, evenhim who giveth not; soften the mind even of the Pani. Dis-tinguish the paths that lead to the winning of the plenitude,slay the aggressors, let our thoughts be perfected. Smite thehearts of the Panis with thy goad, O seer; so make them sub-ject to us. Smite them, O Pushan, with thy goad and desirein the heart of the Pani our delight; so make him subject tous. . . . Thy goad thou bearest that impels the word to rise,O shining seer, with that write thy line on the hearts of alland sever them, (so make them subject to us). Thy goad ofwhich thy ray is the point and which perfects the herds (of


thought-vision, pasusadhanı, cf. sadhantam dhiyah. in verse 4),the delight of that we desire. Create for us the thought thatwins the cow, that wins the horse, that wins the plenitude of thewealth.”

If we are right in our interpretation of this symbol of thePanis, these ideas are sufficiently intelligible without deprivingthe word of its ordinary sense, as does Sayana, and making itmean only a miserly, greedy human being whom the hunger-stricken poet is thus piteously importuning the Sun-God to turnto softness and charity. The Vedic idea was that the subconscientdarkness and the ordinary life of ignorance held concealed in itall that belongs to the divine life and that these secret richesmust be recovered first by destroying the impenitent powers ofignorance and then by possessing the lower life subjected tothe higher. Of Indra it has been said, as we have seen, that heeither slays or conquers the Dasyu and transfers his wealth tothe Aryan. So also Sarama refuses peace with alliance to thePanis, but suggests their submission to the gods and the Aryansby the surrender and ascent of the imprisoned cows and theirown departure from the darkness to a better place (a varıyah. ).And it is by the strenuous touch of the goad of the luminous seer,Pushan, lord of the Truth, the goad that drives open the closedheart and makes the sacred word to arise from its depths, it isby this luminous-pointed goad which perfects the radiant cows,accomplishes the luminous thoughts, that the conversion of thePani is effected; then the Truth-god in his darkened heart alsodesires that which the Aryan desires. Therefore by this penetrat-ing action of the Light and the Truth the powers of the ordinaryignorant sense-activity become subject to the Aryan.

But, normally, they are his enemies, not dasa in the senseof submission and service (dasa, servant, from das to work),but in the sense of destruction and injury (dasa, dasyu, an en-emy, plunderer, from das to divide, hurt, injure). The Pani is therobber who snatches away the cows of light, the horses of theswiftness and the treasures of the divine plenitude, he is the wolf,the eater, atri, vr.ka; he is the obstructor, nid, and spoiler of theword. He is the enemy, the thief, the false or evil thinker who


makes difficult the Path by his robberies and obstructions; “Castaway utterly far from us the enemy, the thief, the crooked onewho places falsely the thought; O master of existence, make ourpath easy to travel. Slay the Pani for he is the wolf, that devours”(VI.51.13-14). His rising to the attack must be checked by thegods. “This god (Soma) in his birth with Indra for helper heldback by force the Pani” and won Swar and the sun and allthe riches, (VI.44.22). The Panis have to be slain or routed sothat their riches may be ravished from them and devoted to thehigher life. “Thou who didst sever the Pani in his continuousranks, thine are these strong givings, O Saraswati. O Saraswati,crush the obstructors of the gods” (VI.61). “O Agni and Soma,then was your strength awakened when you robbed the Pani ofthe cows and found the one Light for many” (I.93.4).

When the gods awake in the Dawn for the sacrifice, the Panismust not awake also to interfere with its successful progress; letthem sleep in their cavern darkness. “O Dawn, queen of theplenitudes, awaken those who fill us (the gods), but let the Panissleep unawakening. Richly dawn for the lords of the plenitude,O queen of the Plenitude, richly for him who affirms thee, ODawn that art Truth. Young she shines out before us, she hascreated her host of the ruddy cows; in the non-existent vision hasdawned out wide” (I.124.10-11). Or again in IV.51, “Lo, in frontof us that supreme light full of the knowledge has arisen out ofthe darkness; daughters of heaven shining wide, the Dawns havecreated the path for the human being. The Dawns stand in frontof us like pillars in the sacrifices; breaking out pure and purifyingthey have opened the doors of the pen, the darkness. Breakingforth today the dawns awaken to knowledge the enjoyers for thegiving of the rich felicity; within where there is no play of lightlet the Panis sleep unwaking in the heart of the darkness.” Intothis nether darkness they have to be cast down from the higherplanes while the Dawns imprisoned by them in that night have tobe lifted to the highest planes. “Panis who make the knot of thecrookedness, who have not the will to works, spoilers of speech,who have not faith, who increase not, who do not sacrifice, themhas Agni driven farther and farther; supreme, he has made them


nethermost who will not sacrifice. And (the Cows, the Dawns)who rejoiced in the nether darkness, by his power he has madeto move to the highest. . . . He has broken down by his blows thewalls that limit, he has given the Dawns to be possessed by theAryan,” aryapatnır us.asas cakara (VII.6.3-5). The Rivers andDawns when in the possession of Vritra or Vala are described asdasapatnıh. ; by the action of the gods they become aryapatnıh. ,they become the helpmates of the Aryan.

The lords of the ignorance have to be slain or enslaved tothe Truth and its seekers, but their wealth is indispensable to thehuman fulfilment; it is as if “on the most wealth-abounding headof the Panis” (VI.45.31) that Indra takes his stand, pan. ınamvars.is.t.he murdhann asthat; he becomes himself the Cow ofLight and the Horse of Swiftness and lavishes an ever-increasingthousandfold wealth. The fullness of that luminous wealth of thePanis and its ascent heavenward is, as we know already, the Pathand the birth of the Immortality. “The Angiras held the suprememanifestation (of the Truth), they who had lit the fire, by perfectaccomplishment of the work; they gained the whole enjoymentof the Pani, its herds of the cows and the horses. Atharvan firstformed the Path, thereafter Surya was born as the protector ofthe Law and the Blissful One, tatah. suryo vratapa vena ajani.Ushanas Kavya drove upward the Cows. With them may wewin by the sacrifice the immortality that is born as a child to theLord of the Law,” yamasya jatam amr.tam yajamahe (I.83.4-5).Angira is the Rishi who represents the Seer-Will, Atharvan is theRishi of the journeying on the Path, Ushanas Kavya is the Rishiof the heavenward desire that is born from the seer-knowledge.The Angiras win the wealth of illuminations and powers of theTruth concealed behind the lower life and its crookednesses;Atharvan forms in their strength the Path and Surya the Lordof Light is then born as the guardian of the divine Law andthe Yama-power; Ushanas drives the herded illuminations ofour thought up that path of the Truth to the Bliss which Suryapossesses; so is born from the law of the Truth the immortalityto which the Aryan soul by its sacrifice aspires.

Chapter XXIII

Summary of Conclusions

WE HAVE now closely scrutinised the Angiras legend inthe Rig Veda from all possible sides and in all its mainsymbols and are in a position to summarise firmly

the conclusions we have drawn from it. As I have already said,the Angiras legend and the Vritra mythus are the two principalparables of the Veda; they occur and recur everywhere; they runthrough the hymns as two closely connected threads of symbolicimagery, and around them all the rest of the Vedic symbolismis woven. Not that they are its central ideas, but they are twomain pillars of this ancient structure. When we determine theirsense, we have determined the sense of the whole Rik Sanhita.If Vritra and the waters symbolise the cloud and the rain andthe gushing forth of the seven rivers of the Punjab and if theAngirases are the bringers of the physical dawn, then the Veda isa symbolism of natural phenomena personified in the figure ofgods and Rishis and maleficent demons. If Vritra and Vala areDravidian gods and the Panis and Vritras human enemies, thenthe Veda is a poetical and legendary account of the invasion ofDravidian India by Nature-worshipping barbarians. If on theother hand this is a symbolism of the struggle between spiritualpowers of Light and Darkness, Truth and Falsehood, Knowledgeand Ignorance, Death and Immortality, then that is the real senseof the whole Veda.

We have concluded that the Angiras Rishis are bringers ofthe Dawn, rescuers of the Sun out of the darkness, but that thisDawn, Sun, Darkness are figures used with a spiritual signif-icance. The central conception of the Veda is the conquest ofthe Truth out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquestof the Truth the conquest also of Immortality. For the VedicRitam is a spiritual as well as a psychological conception. Itis the true being, the true consciousness, the true delight of


existence beyond this earth of body, this mid-region of vitalforce, this ordinary sky or heaven of mind. We have to crossbeyond all these planes in order to arrive at the higher planeof that superconscient Truth which is the own home of thegods and the foundation of Immortality. This is the world ofSwar, to which the Angirases have found the path for theirposterity.

The Angirases are at once the divine seers who assist inthe cosmic and human workings of the gods and their earthlyrepresentatives, the ancient fathers who first found the wisdomof which the Vedic hymns are a chant and memory and renewalin experience. The seven divine Angirases are sons or powersof Agni, powers of the Seer-Will, the flame of divine Force in-stinct with divine knowledge which is kindled for the victory.The Bhrigus have found this Flame secret in the growths of theearthly existence, but the Angirases kindle it on the altar ofsacrifice and maintain the sacrifice through the periods of thesacrificial year symbolising the periods of the divine labour bywhich the Sun of Truth is recovered out of the darkness. Thosewho sacrifice for nine months of this year are Navagwas, seersof the nine cows or nine rays, who institute the search for theherds of the Sun and the march of Indra to battle with the Panis.Those who sacrifice for ten months are the Dashagwas, seers ofthe ten rays who enter with Indra into the cave of the Panis andrecover the lost herds.

The sacrifice is the giving by man of what he possesses inhis being to the higher or divine nature and its fruit is the fartherenrichment of his manhood by the lavish bounty of the gods.The wealth thus gained constitutes a state of spiritual riches,prosperity, felicity which is itself a power for the journey and aforce of battle. For the sacrifice is a journey, a progression; thesacrifice itself travels led by Agni up the divine path to the godsand of this journey the ascent of the Angiras fathers to the divineworld of Swar is the type. Their journey of the sacrifice is alsoa battle, for it is opposed by Panis, Vritras and other powers ofevil and falsehood, and of this warfare the conflict of Indra andthe Angirases with the Panis is a principal episode.

Summary of Conclusions 243

The principal features of sacrifice are the kindling of thedivine flame, the offering of the ghr.ta and the Soma wine andthe chanting of the sacred word. By the hymn and the offeringthe gods are increased; they are said to be born, created ormanifested in man and by their increase and greatness here theyincrease the earth and heaven, that is to say, the physical andmental existence to their utmost capacity and, exceeding these,create in their turn the higher worlds or planes. The higherexistence is the divine, the infinite of which the shining Cow,the infinite Mother, Aditi, is the symbol; the lower is subjectto her dark form Diti. The object of the sacrifice is to win thehigher or divine being and possess with it and make subject toits law and truth the lower or human existence. The ghr.ta ofthe sacrifice is the yield of the shining Cow; it is the clarity orbrightness of the solar light in the human mentality. The Somais the immortal delight of existence secret in the waters and theplant and pressed out for drinking by gods and men. The wordis the inspired speech expressing the thought-illumination of theTruth which rises out of the soul, formed in the heart, shapedby the mind. Agni growing by the ghr.ta, Indra forceful withthe luminous strength and joy of the Soma and increased by theWord, aid the Angirases to recover the herds of the Sun.

Brihaspati is the Master of the creative Word. If Agni is thesupreme Angiras, the flame from whom the Angirases are born,Brihaspati is the one Angiras with the seven mouths, the sevenrays of the illuminative thought and the seven words whichexpress it, of whom these seers are the powers of utterance. Itis the complete thought of the Truth, the seven-headed, whichwins the fourth or divine world for man by winning for himthe complete spiritual wealth, object of the sacrifice. ThereforeAgni, Indra, Brihaspati, Soma are all described as winners ofthe herds of the Sun and destroyers of the Dasyus who concealand withhold them from man. Saraswati, who is the stream ofthe Word or inspiration of the Truth, is also a Dasyu-slayer andwinner of the shining herds; and they are discovered by Sarama,forerunner of Indra, who is a solar or dawn goddess and seemsto symbolise the intuitive power of the Truth. Usha, the Dawn,


is at once herself a worker in the great victory and in her fulladvent its luminous result.

Usha is the divine Dawn, for the Sun that arises by hercoming is the Sun of the superconscient Truth; the day he bringsis the day of the true life in the true knowledge, the night hedispels is the night of the ignorance which yet conceals the dawnin its bosom. Usha herself is the Truth, sunr.ta, and the motherof Truths. These truths of the divine Dawn are called her cows,her shining herds; while the forces of the Truth that accompanythem and occupy the Life are called her horses. Around thissymbol of the cows and horses much of the Vedic symbolismturns; for these are the chief elements of the riches sought byman from the gods. The cows of the Dawn have been stolen andconcealed by the demons, the lords of darkness in their nethercave of the secret subconscient. They are the illuminations ofknowledge, the thoughts of the Truth, gavo matayah. , whichhave to be delivered out of their imprisonment. Their release isthe upsurging of the powers of the divine Dawn.

It is also the recovery of the Sun that was lying in the dark-ness; for it is said that the Sun, “that Truth”, was the thingfound by Indra and the Angirases in the cave of the Panis. Bythe rending of that cave the herds of the divine dawn whichare the rays of the Sun of Truth ascend the hill of being andthe Sun itself ascends to the luminous upper ocean of the divineexistence, led over it by the thinkers like a ship over the waters,till it reaches its farther shore.

The Panis who conceal the herds, the masters of the nethercavern, are a class of Dasyus who are in the Vedic symbolism setin opposition to the Aryan gods and Aryan seers and workers.The Aryan is he who does the work of sacrifice, finds the sacredword of illumination, desires the Gods and increases them andis increased by them into the largeness of the true existence;he is the warrior of the light and the traveller to the Truth.The Dasyu is the undivine being who does no sacrifice, amassesa wealth he cannot rightly use because he cannot speak theword or mentalise the superconscient Truth, hates the Word, thegods and the sacrifice and gives nothing of himself to the higher


existences but robs and withholds his wealth from the Aryan.He is the thief, the enemy, the wolf, the devourer, the divider,the obstructor, the confiner. The Dasyus are powers of darknessand ignorance who oppose the seeker of truth and immortality.The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, formsand personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and bytheir growth and human workings in man raise him to the truthand the immortality.

Thus the interpretation of the Angiras myth gives us the keyto the whole secret of the Veda. For if the cows and horses lostby the Aryans and recovered for them by the gods, the cows andhorses of which Indra is the lord and giver and indeed himself theCow and Horse, are not physical cattle, if these elements of thewealth sought by the sacrifice are symbols of a spiritual riches,so also must be its other elements which are always associatedwith them, sons, men, gold, treasure, etc. If the Cow of which theghr.ta is the yield is not a physical cow but the shining Mother,then the ghr.ta itself which is found in the waters and is said to betriply secreted by the Panis in the Cow, is no physical offering,nor the honey-wine of Soma either which is also said to exist inthe rivers and to rise in a honeyed wave from the ocean and toflow streaming up to the gods. And if these, then also the otherofferings of the sacrifice must be symbolic; the outer sacrificeitself can be nothing but the symbol of an inner giving. And ifthe Angiras Rishis are also in part symbolic or are, like the gods,semi-divine workers and helpers in the sacrifice, so also must bethe Bhrigus, Atharvans, Ushana and Kutsa and others who areassociated with them in their work. If the Angiras legend andthe story of the struggle with the Dasyus is a parable, so alsoshould be the other legendary stories we find in the Rig Vedaof the help given by the Gods to the Rishis against the demons;for these also are related in similar terms and constantly classedby the Vedic poets along with the Angiras story as on the samefooting.

Similarly if these Dasyus who refuse the gift and the sacrifice,and hate the Word and the gods and with whom the Aryans areconstantly at war, these Vritras, Panis and others, are not human


enemies but powers of darkness, falsehood and evil, then thewhole idea of the Aryan wars and kings and nations begins totake upon itself the aspect of spiritual symbol and apologue.Whether they are entirely so or only partly, cannot be decidedexcept by a more detailed examination which is not our presentobject. Our object is only to see whether there is a prima faciecase for the idea with which we started that the Vedic hymns arethe symbolic gospel of the ancient Indian mystics and their sensespiritual and psychological. Such a prima facie case we haveestablished; for there is already sufficient ground for seriouslyapproaching the Veda from this standpoint and interpreting itin detail as such a lyric symbolism.

Still, to make our case entirely firm it will be well to examinethe other companion legend of Vritra and the waters which wehave seen to be closely connected with that of the Angirases andthe Light. In the first place Indra the Vritra-slayer is along withAgni one of the two chief gods of the Vedic Pantheon and if hischaracter and functions can be properly established, we shallhave the general type of the Aryan gods fixed firmly. Secondly,the Maruts, his companions, singers of the sacred chant, are thestrongest point of the naturalistic theory of Vedic worship; theyare undoubtedly storm-gods and no other of the greater Vedicdeities, Agni or the Ashwins or Varuna and Mitra or Twashtriand the goddesses or even Surya the Sun or Usha the Dawn havesuch a pronounced physical character. If then these storm-godscan be shown to have a psychological character and symbolism,then there can be no farther doubt about the profounder sense ofthe Vedic religion and ritual. Finally, if Vritra and his associateddemons, Shushna, Namuchi and the rest appear when closelyscrutinised to be Dasyus in the spiritual sense and if the meaningof the heavenly waters he obstructs be more thoroughly investi-gated, then the consideration of the stories of the Rishis and thegods and demons as parables can be proceeded with from a surestarting-point and the symbolism of the Vedic worlds broughtnearer to a satisfactory interpretation.

More we cannot at present attempt; for the Vedic symbolismas worked out in the hymns is too complex in its details, too


numerous in its standpoints, presents too many obscurities anddifficulties to the interpreter in its shades and side allusions andabove all has been too much obscured by ages of oblivion andmisunderstanding to be adequately dealt with in a single work.We can only at present seek out the leading clues and lay assecurely as may be the right foundations.

Part Two

Selected Hymns

Author’s Note

These translations are offered here only in their resultsfor the interest of the general reader and as an illustrationof the theory advanced. Their philological and criticaljustification would be interesting only to a limited circle.A few indications, however, may at a later stage be givenwhich will illustrate the method.

I

The Colloquy of Indra and Agastya

Rig Veda I.170

n n� nmE�t no �v� k�t��d ydd� B� tm� ay�y Ec�mEB s�cr� ym� tADFt� Ev n�yEt � ��

Indra

1. It is not now, nor is It tomorrow; who knoweth that whichis Supreme and Wonderful? It has motion and action in theconsciousness of another, but when It is approached by thethought, It vanishes.

Ek� n id� EjGA�sEs B�Atro mzt�tv t�EB� kSp�v sAD� yA mA n� smrZ� vDF� � ��

Agastya

2. Why dost thou seek to smite us, O Indra? The Maruts arethy brothers. By them accomplish perfection; slay us not inour struggle.

Ek� no B�Atrg��y sKA s�Et mys� Ev�A Eh t� yTA mno��m�yEm� Ed�sEs � ��ar� k� vt� v�Ed� smE�nEmDtA� p� r� t�Am� t�y c�tn� y�� t� tnvAvh� � ��

Indra

3. Why, O my brother Agastya, art thou my friend, yet settestthy thought beyond me? For well do I know how to us thouwillest not to give thy mind.

254 Selected Hymns

4. Let them make ready the altar, let them set Agni in blazein front. It is there, the awakening of the consciousnessto Immortality. Let us two extend for thee thy effectivesacrifice.

�vmFEfq� vs� pt� vs� nA� �v� Em�AZA� Em�pt� D��W� id� �v� mzEd� B� s� vd�vAD AfAn !t� TA hvF�Eq � "�

Agastya

5. O Lord of substance over all substances of being, thou artthe master in force! O Lord of Love over the powers oflove, thou art the strongest to hold in status! Do thou, OIndra, agree with the Maruts, then enjoy the offerings in theordered method of the Truth.

COMMENTARY

The governing idea of the hymn belongs to a stage of spiritualprogress when the human soul wishes by the sheer force ofThought to hasten forward beyond in order to reach prematurelythe source of all things without full development of the beingin all its progressive stages of conscious activity. The effort isopposed by the Gods who preside over the universe of man andof the world and a violent struggle takes place in the human con-sciousness between the individual soul in its egoistic eagernessand the universal Powers which seek to fulfil the divine purposeof the Cosmos.

The seer Agastya at such a moment confronts in his innerexperience Indra, Lord of Swar, the realm of pure intelligence,through which the ascending soul passes into the divine Truth.

Indra speaks first of that unknowable Source of things to-wards which Agastya is too impatiently striving. That is notto be found in Time. It does not exist in the actualities of thepresent, nor in the eventualities of the future. It neither is nownor becomes hereafter. Its being is beyond Space and Time andtherefore in Itself cannot be known by that which is in Space

The Colloquy of Indra and Agastya 255

and Time. It manifests Itself by Its forms and activities in theconsciousness of that which is not Itself and through those ac-tivities it is meant that It should be realised. But if one tries toapproach It and study It in Itself, It disappears from the thoughtthat would seize It and is as if It were not.

Agastya still does not understand why he is so violentlyopposed in a pursuit which is the eventual aim of all beingand which all his thoughts and feelings demand. The Marutsare the powers of Thought which by the strong and apparentlydestructive motion of their progress break down that which isestablished and help to the attainment of new formations. Indra,the Power of pure Intelligence, is their brother, kin to them inhis nature although elder in being. He should by their meanseffect the perfection towards which Agastya is striving and notturn enemy nor slay his friend in this terrible struggle towardsthe goal.

Indra replies that Agastya is his friend and brother, —brother in the soul as children of one Supreme Being, friend ascomrades in a common effort and one in the divine love thatunites God and man, — and by this friendship and alliance hasattained to the present stage in his progressive perfection; butnow he treats Indra as an inferior Power and wishes to go beyondwithout fulfilling himself in the domain of the God. He seeksto divert his increased thought-powers towards his own objectinstead of delivering them up to the universal Intelligence sothat it may enrich its realisations in humanity through Agastyaand lead him forward by the way of the Truth. Let the egoisticendeavour cease, the great sacrifice be resumed, the flame ofthe divine Force, Agni, be kindled in front as head of thesacrifice and leader of the march. Indra and Agastya together,the universal Power and the human soul, will extend in harmonythe effective inner action on the plane of the pure Intelligenceso that it may enrich itself there and attain beyond. For it isprecisely by the progressive surrender of the lower being to thedivine activities that the limited and egoistic consciousness ofthe mortal awakens to the infinite and immortal state which isits goal.

256 Selected Hymns

Agastya accepts the will of the God and submits. He agreesto perceive and fulfil the Supreme in the activities of Indra.From his own realm Indra is supreme lord over the substancesof being as manifested through the triple world of mind, lifeand body and has therefore power to dispose of its formationstowards the fulfilment, in the movement of Nature, of the divineTruth that expresses itself in the universe, — supreme lord overlove and delight manifested in the same triple world and hastherefore power to fix those formations harmoniously in thestatus of Nature. Agastya gives up all that is realised in him intothe hands of Indra, as offerings of the sacrifice, to be held byhim in the fixed parts of Agastya’s consciousness and directedin the motional towards fresh formations. Indra is once moreto enter into friendly parley with the upward aspiring powersof Agastya’s being and to establish agreement between the seer’sthoughts and the illumination that comes to us through thepure Intelligence. That power will then enjoy in Agastya theofferings of the sacrifice according to the right order of thingsas formulated and governed by the Truth which is beyond.

II

Indra, Giver of Light

Rig Veda I.4

s� #pk� $� m� ty� s� d� GAEmv god� h� j� h� mEs %Ev%Ev � ��

1. The fashioner of perfect forms, like a good yielder for themilker of the Herds, we call for increase from day to day.

up n� svnA gEh som�y sompA� Epb godA id� r�vto md� � ��

2. Come to our Soma-offerings. O Soma-drinker, drink of theSoma-wine; the intoxication of thy rapture gives indeed theLight.

aTA t� atmAnA� Ev%Am s� mtFnAm� mA no aEt Hy aA gEh � ��

3. Then may we know somewhat of thy uttermost right think-ings. Show not beyond us, come.

pr�Eh Evg�m�t� tEmd�� p� QCA EvpE�ctm� y�t� sEK�y aA vrm� � ��

4. Come over, question Indra of the clear-seeing mind, the vig-orous, the unoverthrown, who to thy comrades has broughtthe highest good.

ut b��vt� no Endo EnrytE�cdArt dDAnA id� id� d� v� � "�

258 Selected Hymns

5. And may the Restrainers1 say to us, “Nay, forth and striveon even in other fields, reposing on Indra your activity.”

ut n� s� BgA& aErvo'c�y� d'�m k� �Vy� �yAm�Edd� �y fm'EZ � (�

6. And may the fighters, doers of the work,2 declare us entirelyblessed, O achiever; may we abide in Indra’s peace.

emAf� mAfv� Br y�E)y� n� mAdnm� ptyn� mdy�sKm� � *�

7. Intense for the intense bring thou this glory of the sacrificethat intoxicates the Man, carrying forward on the way Indrawho gives joy to his friend.

a�y pF�vA ft+to Gno v� �AZAmBv� Avo vAj�q� vAEjnm� � ,�

8. When thou hadst drunk of this, O thou of the hundred activ-ities, thou becamest a slayer of the Coverers and protectedstthe rich mind in its riches.

t� �vA vAj�q� vAEjn� vAjyAm� ft+to DnAnAEmd� sAty� � -�

1 Or Censurers, Nidah. . The root nid bears, I think, in the Veda the sense of “bondage”,“confinement”, “limitation”, which can be assigned to it with entire certainty by philo-logical deduction. It is the base of nidita, bound, and nidana, tether. But the root alsomeans to blame. After the peculiar method of the esoteric diction one or other sensepredominates in different passages without entirely excluding the other.2 Arih. kr.s.t.ayah. may also be translated, “the Aryan people”, or “the warlike nations”.

The words kr.s.t.i and cars.an. i, interpreted by Sayana as “man”, have as their base theroots kr.s. and cars. which originally imply labour, effort or laborious action. They meansometimes the doer of Vedic Karma, sometimes, the Karma itself, — the worker or theworks.

Indra, Giver of Light 259

9. Thee thus rich in thy riches we enrich again, O Indra, Othou of the hundred activities, for the safe enjoyment of ourhavings.

yo rAyo�vEnm'hA�s� pAr� s� vt� sKA t�mA id� Ay gAyt � �.�

10. He who in his vastness is a continent of bliss, — the friendof the Soma-giver and he carries him safely through, — tothat Indra raise the chant.

(SAYANA’S INTERPRETATION)

1. “The doer of (works that have) a good shape, Indra, we calldaily for protection as (one calls) for the cow-milker a goodmilch-cow.

2. “Come to our (three) libations, drink of the Soma, O Soma-drinker; the intoxication of thee, the wealthy one, is indeedcow-giving.

3. “Then (standing) among the intelligent people who are near-est to thee, may we know thee. Do not (go) beyond us (and)manifest (thyself to others, but) come to us.

4. “Come to him and question about me, the intelligent one,(whether I have praised him rightly or not), — to the intelli-gent and unhurt Indra who gives to thy friends (the priests)the best wealth.

5. “Let of us (i.e. our priests) speak (i.e. praise Indra), — andalso, O you who censure, go out (from here) and fromelsewhere too, — (our priests) doing service all about Indra.

6. “O destroyer (of foes), may even our enemies speak of usas having good wealth, — men (i.e. our friends will say it ofcourse); may we be in the peace (bestowed) by Indra.

7. “Bring this Soma, that wealth of the sacrifice, the cause ofexhilaration to men, (the Soma) that pervades (the threeoblations) for Indra who pervades (the Soma-offering), thatattains the rites and is friendly to (Indra) who gives joy (tothe sacrificer).

260 Selected Hymns

8. “Drinking of this, O thou of many actions, thou becamest aslayer of Vritras (i.e. enemies led by Vritra) and didst protectentirely the fighter in the fights.

9. “O Indra of many actions, for enjoyment of riches we makethee abundant in food who art strong in the battles.3

10. “Sing to that Indra who is a protector of wealth, great, agood fulfiller (of works) and a friend of the sacrificer.”

COMMENTARY

Madhuchchhandas, son of Vishwamitra, invokes in the Soma-offering Indra, the Master of luminous Mind, for increase inthe Light. The symbols of the hymn are those of a collectivesacrifice. Its subject is the growth of power and delight in Indraby the drinking of the Soma, the wine of immortality, and theconsequent illumination of the human being so that the obstruc-tions of his inner knowledge are removed and he attains to theutmost splendours of the liberated mind.

But what is this Soma, called sometimes amrita, the Greekambrosia, as if it were itself the substance of immortality? It is afigure for the divine Ananda, the principle of Bliss, from which,in the Vedic conception, the existence of Man, this mental being,is drawn. A secret Delight is the base of existence, its sustainingatmosphere and almost its substance. This Ananda is spoken ofin the Taittiriya Upanishad as the ethereal atmosphere of blisswithout which nothing could remain in being. In the AitareyaUpanishad Soma, as the lunar deity, is born from the sense-mind

3 Note that Sayana explains vajinam in v. 8 as “fighter in the fights” and the sameexpression in the very next verse as “strong in the fights” and that in the phrase vajes.uvajinam vajayamah. he takes the base word vaja in three different significances, “battle”,“strength” and “food”. This is a typical example of the deliberate inconsistency ofSayana’s method.

I have given the two renderings together so that the reader may make an easy com-parison between both methods and results. I enclose within brackets the commentator’sexplanations wherever they are necessary to complete the sense or to make it intelligible.Even the reader unacquainted with Sanskrit will be able, I think, to appreciate from thissingle example the reasons which justify the modern critical mind in refusing to acceptSayana as a reliable authority for the interpretation of the Vedic text.


in the universal Purusha and, when man is produced, expresseshimself again as sense-mentality in the human being. For delightis the raison d’etre of sensation, or, we may say, sensation is anattempt to translate the secret delight of existence into the termsof physical consciousness. But in that consciousness, — oftenfigured as adri, the hill, stone, or dense substance, — divine lightand divine delight are both of them concealed and confined, andhave to be released or extracted. Ananda is retained as rasa,the sap, the essence, in sense-objects and sense-experiences, inthe plants and growths of the earth-nature, and among thesegrowths the mystic Soma-plant symbolises that element behindall sense activities and their enjoyments which yields the divineessence. It has to be distilled and, once distilled, purified andintensified until it has grown luminous, full of radiance, fullof swiftness, full of energy, gomat, asu, yuvaku. It becomesthe chief food of the gods who, called to the Soma-oblation,take their share of the enjoyment and in the strength of thatecstasy increase in man, exalt him to his highest possibilities,make him capable of the supreme experiences. Those who donot give the delight in them as an offering to the divine Powers,preferring to reserve themselves for the sense and the lower life,are adorers not of the gods, but of the Panis, lords of the sense-consciousness, traffickers in its limited activities, they who pressnot the mystic wine, give not the purified offering, raise not thesacred chant. It is the Panis who steal from us the Rays of theillumined consciousness, those brilliant herds of the sun, andpen them up in the cavern of the subconscient, in the dense hillof matter, corrupting even Sarama, the hound of heaven, theluminous intuition, when she comes on their track to the caveof the Panis.

But the conception of this hymn belongs to a stage in ourinner progress when the Panis have been exceeded and eventhe Vritras or Coverers who seclude from us our full powersand activities and Vala who holds back the Light, are alreadyoverpassed. But there are even then powers that stand in theway of our perfection. They are the powers of limitation, theConfiners or Censurers, who, without altogether obscuring the

262 Selected Hymns

rays or damming up the energies, yet seek by constantly affirm-ing the deficiencies of our self-expression to limit its field and setup the progress realised as an obstacle to the progress to come.Madhuchchhandas calls upon Indra to remove the defect andaffirm in its place an increasing illumination.

The principle which Indra represents is Mind-Power re-leased from the limits and obscurations of the nervous con-sciousness. It is this enlightened Intelligence which fashions rightor perfect forms of thought or of action not deformed by thenervous impulses, not hampered by the falsehoods of sense. Theimage presented is that of a cow giving abundantly its yield tothe milker of the herds. The word go means in Sanskrit both acow and a ray of light. This double sense is used by the Vedicsymbolists to suggest a double figure which was to them morethan a figure; for light, in their view, is not merely an apt poeticimage of thought, but is actually its physical form. Thus, theherds that are milked are the Herds of the Sun, — Surya, God ofthe revelatory and intuitive mind, or else of Dawn, the goddesswho manifests the solar glory. The Rishi desires from Indra adaily increase of this light of Truth by his fuller activity pouringrays in a rich yield upon the receptive mind.

The activity of the pure illuminated Intelligence is sustainedand increased by the conscious expression in us of the delight indivine existence and divine activity typified by the Soma wine. Asthe Intelligence feeds upon it, its action becomes an intoxicatedecstasy of inspiration by which the rays come pouring abun-dantly and joyously in. “Light-giving indeed is the intoxicationof thee in thy rapture.”

For then it is possible, breaking beyond the limitations stillinsisted upon by the Confiners, to arrive at something of thefinalities of knowledge possible to the illuminated intelligence.Right thoughts, right sensibilities, — this is the full sense of theword sumati; for the Vedic mati includes not only the thinking,but also the emotional parts of mentality. Sumati is a light in thethoughts; it is also a bright gladness and kindness in the soul. Butin this passage the stress of the sense is upon right thought andnot on the emotions. It is necessary, however, that the progress


in right thinking should commence in the field of consciousnessalready attained; there must not be flashes and dazzling mani-festations which by going beyond our powers elude expressionin right form and confuse the receptive mind. Indra must benot only illuminer, but a fashioner of right thought-formations,surupakr.tnu.

The Rishi, next, turning to a comrade in the collective Yoga,or, perhaps, addressing his own mind, encourages him or it topass beyond the obstruction of the adverse suggestions opposedto him and by questioning the divine Intelligence progress tothe highest good which it has already given to others. For it isthat Intelligence which clearly discerns and can solve or removeall still-existing confusion and obscuration. Swift of movement,intense, energetic, it does not by its energy stumble in its pathslike the impulses of the nervous consciousness. Or perhaps itis rather meant that owing to its invincible energy it does notsuccumb to the attacks whether of the Coverers or of the powersthat limit.

Next are described the results towards which the seer as-pires. With this fuller light opening on to the finalities of mentalknowledge the powers of Limitation will be satisfied and ofthemselves will withdraw, consenting to the farther advance andto the new luminous activities. They will say, in effect, “Yes,now you have the right which we were hitherto justified indenying. Not only in the fields won already, but in other anduntrod provinces pursue then your conquering march. Reposethis action wholly on the divine Intelligence, not upon yourlower capacities. For it is the greater surrender which gives youthe greater right.”

The word arata, move or strive, like its congeners ari, arya,arya, arata, aran. i, expresses the central idea of the Veda. Theroot ar indicates always a movement of effort or of struggle or astate of surpassing height or excellence; it is applied to rowing,ploughing, fighting, lifting, climbing. The Aryan then is the manwho seeks to fulfil himself by the Vedic action, the internal andexternal karma or apas, which is of the nature of a sacrifice tothe gods. But it is also imaged as a journey, a march, a battle,

264 Selected Hymns

a climbing upwards. The Aryan man labours towards heights,fights his way on in a march which is at once a progress forwardand an ascent. That is his Aryahood, his arete, virtue, to use aGreek word derived from the same root. Arata, with the rest ofthe phrase, might be translated, “Out and push forward in otherfields.”

The idea is taken up again, in the subtle Vedic fashion ofthought-connections by word-echoes, with the arih. kr.s.t.ayah. ofthe next verse. These are, I think, not the Aryan nations onearth, although that sense too is possible when the idea is thatof a collective or national Yoga, but the powers that help manin his ascent, his spiritual kindred bound to him as comrades,allies, brothers, yokefellows (sakhayah. , yujah. , jamayah. ), for hisaspiration is their aspiration and by his completeness they arefulfilled. As the Restrainers are satisfied and give way, so theytoo, satisfied, must affirm finally their task accomplished by thefullness of human bliss, when the soul shall rest in the peace ofIndra that comes with the Light, the peace of a perfected men-tality standing as upon heights of consummated consciousnessand Beatitude.

Therefore is the divine Ananda poured out to be made swiftand intense in the system and offered to Indra for the supportof his intensities. For it is this profound joy manifest in theinner sensations that gives the ecstasy by which the man or theGod grows strong. The divine Intelligence will be able to moveforward in the journey yet uncompleted and will return the giftby fresh powers of the Beatitude descending upon the friend ofGod.

For it was in this strength that the Divine Mind in mandestroyed all that opposed, as Coverers or besiegers, its hun-dredfold activities of will and of thought; in this strength itprotected afterwards the rich and various possessions alreadywon in past battles from the Atris and Dasyus, devourers andplunderers of our gains.

Although, continues Madhuchchhandas, that Intelligence isalready thus rich and variously stored we seek to increase yetmore its force of abundance, removing the Restrainers as well as


the Vritras, so that we may have the full and assured possessionof our riches.

For this Light is, in its entire greatness free from limitation,a continent of felicity; this Power is that which befriends thehuman soul and carries it safe through the battle, to the end ofits march, to the summit of its aspiration.

III

Indra and the Thought-Forces

Rig Veda I.171

Et v enA nmsAhm�Em s� /t�n EB0� s� mEt� t� rAZAm� rrAZtA mzto v�%AEBEn' h�1o D� Ev m� c2vm�vAn� � ��

1. To you I come with this obeisance, by the perfect Word I seekright mentality from the swift in the passage. Take delight,O Maruts, in the things of knowledge, lay aside your wrath,unyoke your steeds.

eq v� �tomo mzto nm�vAn� 3dA t�Vo mnsA DAEy d�vA� up�mA yAt mnsA j� qAZA y� y� Eh �WA nms id� v� DAs� � ��

2. Lo, the hymn of your affirmation, O Maruts; it is fraughtwith my obeisance, it was framed by the heart, it was estab-lished by the mind, O ye gods. Approach these my wordsand embrace them with the mind; for of submission1 areyou the increasers.

�t� tAso no mzto m� 1yt� t �t� to mGvA fMBEv�W� U2vA' n� st� koMyA vnAyhAEn Ev�vA mzto EjgFqA � ��

3. Affirmed let the Maruts be benign to us, affirmed the lordof plenitude has become wholly creative of felicity. Upward

1 Namas. Sayana takes namas throughout in his favourite sense, food; for “increasers ofsalutation” is obviously impossible. It is evident from this and other passages that behindthe physical sense of obeisance the word carries with it a psychological significance whichhere disengages itself clearly from the concrete figure.

Indra and the Thought-Forces 267

may our desirable delights2 be uplifted, O Maruts, upwardall our days by the will towards victory.

a�mAdh� tEvqAdFqmAZ id� Ad� EByA mzto r�jmAn� y� �m�y� h4yA EnEftAyAsn� tAyAr� ck� mA m� 1tA n� � ��

4. I, mastered by this mighty one, trembling with the fear ofIndra, O Maruts, put far away the offerings that for youhad been made intense. Let your grace be upon us.

y�n mAnAsE�ctyt u5A 4y� E�Vq� fvsA f�vtFnAm� s no mzEd� Bv�'qB )vo DA ug� ug��EB� �TEvr� shodA� � "�

5. Thou by whom the movements of the mind grow conscientand brilliant3 in our mornings through the bright power4 ofthe continuous Dawns, O Bull of the herd,5 establish by theMaruts inspired knowledge in us — by them in their energythou energetic, steadfast, a giver of might.

�v� pAhFd� shFyso n6 n� BvA mzEd� BrvyAth�1A� s� k�t�EB� sAsEhd'DAno Ev%Am�q� v� jn� jFrdAn� m� � (�

2 Vanani. The word means both “forests” and “enjoyments” or as an adjective, “en-joyable”. It has commonly the double sense in the Veda, the “pleasant growths” of ourphysical existence, roman. i pr.thivyah. .3 Usrah. . In the feminine the word is used as a synonym for the Vedic go, meaning at

once Cow and ray of light. Usha, the Dawn, also, is gomatı, girt with rays or accompaniedby the herds of the Sun. There is in the text a significant assonance, usra vy-us.t.is.u, oneof the common devices used by the Vedic Rishis to suggest a thought or a connectionwhich they do not consider it essential to bring out expressly.4 Savas. There are a host of words in the Veda for strength, force, power and each

of them carries with it its own peculiar shade of significance. Savas usually conveys theidea of light as well as force.5 Vr.s.abha. Bull, Male, Lord or Puissant. Indra is constantly spoken of as Vr.s.abha or

Vr.s.an. The word is sometimes used by itself, as here, sometimes with another wordgoverned by it to bring out the idea of the herds, e.g. Vr.s.abha matınam, Lord of thethoughts, where the image of the bull and the herd is plainly intended.

268 Selected Hymns

6. Do thou, O Indra, protect the Powers6 in their increasedmight; put away thy wrath against the Maruts, by themin thy forcefulness upheld, who have right perceptions.May we find the strong impulsion that shall break swiftlythrough.

COMMENTARY

A sequel to the colloquy of Indra and Agastya, this Sukta isAgastya’s hymn of propitiation to the Maruts whose sacrificehe had interrupted at the bidding of the mightier deity. Lessdirectly, it is connected in thought with the 165th hymn of theMandala, the colloquy of Indra and the Maruts, in which thesupremacy of the Lord of Heaven is declared and these lessershining hosts are admitted as subordinate powers who impartto men their impulsion towards the high truths which belongto Indra. “Giving the energy of your breath to their thoughtsof varied light, become in them impellers to the knowledge ofmy truths. Whensoever the doer becomes active for the workand the intelligence of the thinker creates us in him, O Maruts,move surely towards that illumined seer,” — such is the closingword of the colloquy, the final injunction of Indra to the inferiordeities.

These verses fix clearly enough the psychological functionof the Maruts. They are not properly gods of thought, rathergods of energy; still, it is in the mind that their energies becomeeffective. To the uninstructed Aryan worshipper, the Marutswere powers of wind, storm and rain; it is the images of thetempest that are most commonly applied to them and they arespoken of as the Rudras, the fierce, impetuous ones, — a namethat they share with the god of Force, Agni. Although Indra isdescribed sometimes as the eldest of the Maruts, — indrajyes.t.ho

6 Nr.n. The word nr. seems to have meant originally active, swift or strong. We havenr.mn.a, strength, and nr.tama nr.n. am, most puissant of the Powers. It came afterwards tomean male or man and in the Veda is oftenest applied to the gods as the male powers orPurushas presiding over the energies of Nature as opposed to the female powers, whoare called gna.


marudgan. ah. , — yet they would seem at first to belong rather tothe domain of Vayu, the Wind-God, who in the Vedic system isthe Master of Life, inspirer of that Breath or dynamic energy,called the Prana, which is represented in man by the vital andnervous activities. But this is only a part of their physiognomy.Brilliance, no less than impetuosity, is their characteristic. Every-thing about them is lustrous, themselves, their shining weapons,their golden ornaments, their resplendent cars. Not only dothey send down the rain, the waters, the abundance of heaven,and break down the things best established to make way fornew movements and new formations, — functions which, forthe rest, they share with other gods, Indra, Mitra, Varuna, —but, like them, they also are friends of Truth, creators of Light.It is so that the Rishi, Gotama Rahugana, prays to them, “Oye who have the flashing strength of the Truth, manifest that byyour might; pierce with your lightning the Rakshasa. Concealthe concealing darkness, repel every devourer, create the Lightfor which we long.” And in another hymn, Agastya says tothem, “They carry with them the sweetness (of the Ananda) astheir eternal offspring and play out their play, brilliant in theactivities of knowledge.” The Maruts, therefore, are energiesof the mentality, energies which make for knowledge. Theirsis not the settled truth, the diffused light, but the movement,the search, the lightning-flash, and, when Truth is found, themany-sided play of its separate illuminations.

We have seen that Agastya in his colloquy with Indra speaksmore than once of the Maruts. They are Indra’s brothers, andtherefore the god should not strike at Agastya in his struggletowards perfection. They are his instruments for that perfec-tion, and as such Indra should use them. And in the closingformula of submission and reconciliation, he prays to the god toparley again with the Maruts and to agree with them so that thesacrifice may proceed in the order and movement of the divineTruth towards which it is directed. The crisis, then, that left sopowerful an impression on the mind of the seer, was in the natureof a violent struggle in which the higher divine Power confrontedAgastya and the Maruts and opposed their impetuous advance.

270 Selected Hymns

There has been wrath and strife between the divine Intelligencethat governs the world and the vehement aspiring powers ofAgastya’s mind. Both would have the human being reach hisgoal; but not as the inferior divine powers choose must thatmarch be directed, — rather as it has been firmly willed andsettled above by the secret Intelligence that always possesses forthe manifested intelligence that still seeks. Therefore the mind ofthe human being has been turned into a battle-field for greaterPowers and is still quivering with the awe and alarm of thatexperience.

The submission to Indra has been made; Agastya now ap-peals to the Maruts to accept the terms of the reconciliation,so that the full harmony of his inner being may be restored.He approaches them with the submission he has rendered tothe greater god and extends it to their brilliant legions. Theperfection of the mental state and its powers which he desires,their clearness, rectitude, truth-observing energy, is not possi-ble without the swift coursing of the Thought-Forces in theirmovement towards the higher knowledge. But that movement,mistakenly directed, not rightly illumined, has been checked bythe formidable opposition of Indra and has departed for a timeout of Agastya’s mentality. Thus repelled, the Maruts have lefthim for other sacrificers; elsewhere shine their resplendent char-iots, in other fields thunder the hooves of their wind-footedsteeds. The Seer prays to them to put aside their wrath, to takepleasure once more in the pursuit of knowledge and in its activ-ities; not passing him by any more, let them unyoke their steeds,descend and take their place on the seat of the sacrifice, assumetheir share of the offerings.

For he would confirm again in himself these splendid en-ergies, and it is a hymn of affirmation that he offers them, thestoma of the Vedic sages. In the system of the Mystics, whichhas partially survived in the schools of Indian Yoga, the Wordis a power, the Word creates. For all creation is expression,everything exists already in the secret abode of the Infinite, guhahitam, and has only to be brought out here in apparent form bythe active consciousness. Certain schools of Vedic thought even


suppose the worlds to have been created by the goddess Wordand sound as first etheric vibration to have preceded forma-tion. In the Veda itself there are passages which treat the poeticmeasures of the sacred mantras, — anus.t.ubh, tris.t.ubh, jagatı,gayatrı, — as symbolic of the rhythms in which the universalmovement of things is cast.

By expression then we create and men are even said to createthe gods in themselves by the mantra. Again, that which we havecreated in our consciousness by the Word, we can fix there by theWord to become part of ourselves and effective not only in ourinner life but upon the outer physical world. By expression weform, by affirmation we establish. As a power of expression theword is termed gıh. or vacas; as a power of affirmation, stoma.In either aspect it is named manma or mantra, expression ofthought in mind, and brahman, expression of the heart or thesoul, — for this seems to have been the earlier sense of the wordbrahman,7 afterwards applied to the Supreme Soul or universalBeing.

The process of formation of the mantra is described in thesecond verse along with the conditions of its effectivity. Agastyapresents the stoma, hymn at once of affirmation and of sub-mission, to the Maruts. Fashioned by the heart, it receives itsjust place in the mentality through confirmation by the mind.The mantra, though it expresses thought in mind, is not in itsessential part a creation of the intellect. To be the sacred andeffective word, it must have come as an inspiration from thesupra-mental plane, termed in Veda, Ritam, the Truth, and havebeen received into the superficial consciousness either throughthe heart or by the luminous intelligence, manıs.a. The heart inVedic psychology is not restricted to the seat of the emotions;it includes all that large tract of spontaneous mentality, nearestto the subconscient in us, out of which rise the sensations, emo-tions, instincts, impulses and all those intuitions and inspirations

7 Also found in the form br.h (Brihaspati, Brahmanaspati); and there seem to have beenolder forms, br.han and brahan. It is from brahan (gen. brahnas) that, in all probability,we have the Greek phren, phrenos, signifying mind.

272 Selected Hymns

that travel through these agencies before they arrive at form inthe intelligence. This is the “heart” of Veda and Vedanta, hr.daya,hr.d, or brahman. There in the present state of mankind thePurusha is supposed to be seated centrally. Nearer to the vastnessof the subconscient, it is there that, in ordinary mankind, — mannot yet exalted to a higher plane where the contact with theInfinite is luminous, intimate and direct, — the inspirations ofthe Universal Soul can most easily enter in and most swiftly takepossession of the individual soul. It is therefore by the power ofthe heart that the mantra takes form. But it has to be receivedand held in the thought of the intelligence as well as in theperceptions of the heart; for not till the intelligence has acceptedand even brooded upon it, can that truth of thought which thetruth of the Word expresses be firmly possessed or normallyeffective. Fashioned by the heart, it is confirmed by the mind.

But another approval is also needed. The individual mindhas accepted; the effective powers of the Cosmos must alsoaccept. The words of the hymn retained by the mind form abasis for the new mental posture from which the future thought-energies have to proceed. The Maruts must approach them andtake their stand upon them, the mind of these universal Powersapprove and unite itself with the formations in the mind of theindividual. So only can our inner or our outer action have itssupreme effectivity.

Nor have the Maruts any reason to refuse their assent or topersist in the prolongation of discord. Divine powers who them-selves obey a higher law than the personal impulse, it should betheir function, as it is their essential nature, to assist the mortalin his surrender to the Immortal and increase obedience to theTruth, the Vast towards which his human faculties aspire.

Indra, affirmed and accepted, is no longer in his contact withthe mortal a cause of suffering; the divine touch is now utterlycreative of peace and felicity. The Maruts too, affirmed andaccepted, must put aside their violence. Assuming their gentlerforms, benignant in their action, not leading the soul throughstrife and disturbance, they too must become purely beneficentas well as puissant agencies.


This complete harmony established, Agastya’s Yoga willproceed triumphantly on the new and straight path prescribedto it. It is always the elevation to a higher plane that is the end,— higher than the ordinary life of divided and egoistic sensation,emotion, thought and action. And it is to be pursued always withthe same puissant will towards victory over all that resists andhampers. But it must be an integral exaltation. All the joys thatthe human being seeks with his desire, all the active energiesof his waking consciousness, — his days, as it is expressed inthe brief symbolic language of the Veda, — must be uplifted tothat higher plane. By vanani are meant the receptive sensationsseeking in all objectivities the Ananda whose quest is their reasonfor existence. These, too, are not excluded. Nothing has to berejected, all has to be raised to the pure levels of the divineconsciousness.

Formerly Agastya had prepared the sacrifice for the Marutsunder other conditions. He had put their full potentiality offorce into all in him that he sought to place in the hands of theThought-Powers; but because of the defect in his sacrifice hehad been met midway by the Mighty One as by an enemy andonly after fear and strong suffering had his eyes been openedand his soul surrendered. Still vibrating with the emotions ofthat experience, he has been compelled to renounce the activitieswhich he had so puissantly prepared. Now he offers the sacrificeagain to the Maruts, but couples with that brilliant Name themore puissant godhead of Indra. Let the Maruts then bear nowrath for the interrupted sacrifice but accept this new and morejustly guided action.

Agastya turns, in the two closing verses, from the Maruts toIndra. The Maruts represent the progressive illumination of hu-man mentality, until from the first obscure movements of mindwhich only just emerge out of the darkness of the subconscient,they are transformed into an image of the luminous conscious-ness of which Indra is the Purusha, the representative Being.Obscure, they become conscient; twilit, half-lit or turned intomisleading reflections, they surmount these deficiencies and puton the divine brilliance. This great evolution is effected in Time

274 Selected Hymns

gradually, in the mornings of the human spirit, by the unbrokensuccession of the Dawns. For Dawn in the Veda is the goddesssymbolic of new openings of divine illumination on man’s phys-ical consciousness. She alternates with her sister Night; but thatdarkness itself is a mother of light and always Dawn comes toreveal what the black-browed Mother has prepared. Here, how-ever, the seer seems to speak of continuous dawns, not brokenby these intervals of apparent rest and obscurity. By the brilliantforce of that continuity of successive illuminations the mentalityof man ascends swiftly into fullest light. But always the forcewhich has governed and made possible the transformation, isthe puissance of Indra. It is that supreme Intelligence whichthrough the Dawns, through the Maruts, has been pouring itselfinto the human being. Indra is the Bull of the radiant herd,the Master of the thought-energies, the Lord of the luminousdawns.

Now also let Indra use the Maruts as his instruments for theillumination. By them let him establish the supramental knowl-edge of the seer. By their energy his energy will be supported inthe human nature and he will give that nature his divine firmness,his divine force, so that it may not stumble under the shock orfail to contain the vaster play of puissant activities too great forour ordinary capacity.

The Maruts, thus reinforced in strength, will always needthe guidance and protection of the superior Power. They are thePurushas of the separate thought-energies, Indra the one Purushaof all thought-energy. In him they find their fullness and theirharmony. Let there then be no longer strife and disagreement be-tween this whole and these parts. The Maruts, accepting Indra,will receive from him the right perception of the things thathave to be known. They will not be misled by the brilliance ofa partial light or carried too far by the absorption of a limitedenergy. They will be able to sustain the action of Indra as heputs forth his force against all that may yet stand between thesoul and its consummation.

So in the harmony of these divine Powers and their aspira-tions may humanity find that impulsion which shall be strong


enough to break through the myriad oppositions of this worldand, in the individual with his composite personality or in therace, pass rapidly on towards the goal so constantly glimpsedbut so distant even to him who seems to himself almost to haveattained.

IV

Agni, the Illumined Will

Rig Veda I.77

kTA dAf�mA�ny� kA�m� d�vj� �VoQyt� BAEmn� gF� yo m�y�'�vm� t !tAvA hotA yEj�W it� k� ZoEt d�vAn� � ��

1. How shall we give to Agni? For him what Word acceptedby the Gods is spoken, for the lord of the brilliant flame? forhim who in mortals, immortal, possessed of the Truth, priestof the oblation strongest for sacrifice, creates the gods?

yo a2vr�q� f�tm !tAvA hotA tm� nmoEBrA k� Z� 2vm� aE�ny'd� v�m'tA'y d�vA�s cA boDAEt mnsA yjAEt � ��

2. He who in the sacrifices is the priest of the offering, fullof peace, full of the Truth, him verily form in you by yoursurrenderings; when Agni manifests1 for the mortals thegods, he also has perception of them and by the mind offersto them the sacrifice.

s Eh +t� � s my'� s sAD� Em'�o n B� dd� B� t�y rTF� t� m�D�q� Tm� d�vytFEv'f up b��vt� d�mmArF� � ��

3. For he is the will, he is the strength, he is the effecter ofperfection, even as Mitra he becomes the charioteer of theSupreme. To him, the first, in the rich-offerings the peopleseeking the godhead utter the word, the Aryan people to thefulfiller.

1 Or “enters into the gods”.

Agni, the Illumined Will 277

s no n� ZA� n� tmo ErfAdA aE�nEg'ro�vsA v�t� DFEtm� tnA c y� mGvAn� fEv�WA vAj s� tA iqyt mm � ��

4. May this strongest of the Powers and devourer of the de-stroyers manifest2 by his presence the Words and their un-derstanding, and may they who in their extension are lordsof plenitude brightest in energy pour forth their plenty andgive their impulsion to the thought.

evAE�ngo'tm�EB!'tAvA Ev �EBr�to�V jAtv�dA� s eq� %� 7� pFpy�s vAj� s p� E�V� yAEt joqmA EcEk�vAn� � "�

5. Thus has Agni possessed of the Truth been affirmed by themasters of light,3 the knower of the worlds by clarifiedminds. He shall foster in them the force of illumination,he too the plenty; he shall attain to increase and to harmonyby his perceptions.

COMMENTARY

Gotama Rahugana is the seer of this Hymn, which is a stoma inpraise of Agni, the divine Will at work in the universe.

Agni is the most important, the most universal of the Vedicgods. In the physical world he is the general devourer and en-joyer. He is also the purifier; when he devours and enjoys, thenalso he purifies. He is the fire that prepares and perfects; he isalso the fire that assimilates and the heat of energy that forms.He is the heat of life and creates the sap, the rasa in things, theessence of their substantial being and the essence of their delight.

He is equally the Will in Prana, the dynamic Life-energy,and in that energy performs the same functions. Devouring and

2 Or “enter into the words and the thinking”.3 Gotamebhih. . In its external sense “by the Gotamas”, the family of the Rishi, Gotama

Rahugana, the seer of the hymn. But the names of the Rishis are constantly used with acovert reference to their meaning. In this passage there is an unmistakable significancein the grouping of the words, gotamebhir r.tava, viprebhir jatavedah. , as in verse 3 indasmam arıh. .

278 Selected Hymns

enjoying, purifying, preparing, assimilating, forming, he risesupwards always and transfigures his powers into the Maruts,the energies of Mind. Our passions and obscure emotions arethe smoke of Agni’s burning. All our nervous forces are assuredof their action only by his support.

If he is the Will in our nervous being and purifies it by action,he is also the Will in the mind and clarifies it by aspiration. Whenhe enters into the intellect, he is drawing near to his divine birth-place and home. He leads the thoughts towards effective power;he leads the active energies towards light.

His divine birth-place and home, — though he is born ev-erywhere and dwells in all things, — is the Truth, the Infinity,the vast cosmic Intelligence in which Knowledge and Force areunified. For there all Will is in harmony with the truth of thingsand therefore effective; all thought part of Wisdom, which is thedivine Law, and therefore perfectly regulative of a divine action.Agni fulfilled becomes mighty in his own home — in the Truth,the Right, the Vast. It is thither that he is leading upward theaspiration in humanity, the soul of the Aryan, the head of thecosmic sacrifice.

It is at the point where there is the first possibility of thegreat passage, the transition from mind to supermind, the trans-figuration of the intelligence, till now the crowned leader ofthe mental being, into a divine Light, — it is at this supremeand crucial point in the Vedic Yoga that the Rishi, GotamaRahugana, seeks in himself for the inspired Word. The Wordshall help him to realise for himself and others the Power thatmust effect the transition and the state of luminous plenitudefrom which the transfiguration must commence.

The Vedic sacrifice is, psychologically, a symbol of cosmicand individual activity become self-conscious, enlightened andaware of its goal. The whole process of the universe is in itsvery nature a sacrifice, voluntary or involuntary. Self-fulfilmentby self-immolation, to grow by giving is the universal law. Thatwhich refuses to give itself, is still the food of the cosmic Powers.“The eater eating is eaten” is the formula, pregnant and terrible,in which the Upanishad sums up this aspect of the universe, and


in another passage men are described as the cattle of the gods. Itis only when the law is recognised and voluntarily accepted thatthis kingdom of death can be overpassed and by the works ofsacrifice Immortality made possible and attained. All the powersand potentialities of the human life are offered up, in the symbolof a sacrifice, to the divine Life in the Cosmos.

Knowledge, Force and Delight are the three powers of thedivine Life; thought and its formations, will and its works, loveand its harmonisings are the corresponding human activitieswhich have to be exalted to the divine level. The dualities oftruth and falsehood, light and darkness, conceptional right andwrong are the confusions of knowledge born of egoistic divi-sion; the dualities of egoistic love and hatred, joy and grief,pleasure and pain are the confusions of Love, perversities ofAnanda; the dualities of strength and weakness, sin and virtue,action and inaction are the confusions of will, dissipators of thedivine Force. And all these confusions arise and even becomenecessary modes of our action because the triune powers ofthe divine Life are divorced from each other, Knowledge fromStrength, Love from both, by the Ignorance which divides. Itis the Ignorance, the dominant cosmic Falsehood that has tobe removed. Through the Truth, then, lies the road to the trueharmony, the consummated felicity, the ultimate fulfilment oflove in the divine Delight. Therefore, only when the Will in manbecomes divine and possessed of the Truth, amr.to r.tava, can theperfection towards which we move be realised in humanity.

Agni, then, is the god who has to become conscient in themortal. Him the inspired Word has to express, to confirm in thisgated mansion and on the altar-seat of this sacrifice.

“How must we give to Agni?” asks the Rishi. The word forthe sacrificial giving, dasema, means literally distribution; it hasa covert connection with the root das in the sense of discernment.The sacrifice is essentially an arrangement, a distribution of thehuman activities and enjoyments among the different cosmicPowers to whose province they by right belong. Therefore thehymns repeatedly speak of the portions of the gods. It is the prob-lem of the right arrangement and distribution of his works that

280 Selected Hymns

presents itself to the sacrificer; for the sacrifice must be alwaysaccording to the Law and the divine ordainment (r.tu, the latervidhi). The will to right arrangement is an all-important prepa-ration for the reign of the supreme Law and Truth in the mortal.

The solution of the problem depends on right realisation,and right realisation starts from the right illuminative Word,expression of the inspired Thought which is sent to the seer outof the Vast. Therefore the Rishi asks farther, “What word isuttered to Agni?” What word of affirmation, what word of real-isation? Two conditions have to be satisfied. The Word must beaccepted by other divine Powers, that is, it must bring out somepotentiality in the nature or bring into it some light of realisationby which the divine Workers may be induced to manifest in thesuperficial consciousness of humanity and embrace openly theirrespective functions. And it must be illuminative of the doublenature of Agni, this Lord of the lustrous flame. Bhama meansboth a light of knowledge and a flame of action. Agni is a Lightas well as a Force.

The Word arrives. Yo martyes.u amr.to r.tava. Agni is, pre-eminently, the Immortal in mortals. It is this Agni by whom theother bright sons of Infinity are able to work out the manifesta-tion and self-extension of the Divine (devavıti, devatati) whichis at once aim and process of the cosmic and of the humansacrifice. For he is the divine Will which in all things is alwayspresent, is always destroying and constructing, always build-ing and perfecting, supporting always the complex progressionof the universe. It is this which persists through all death andchange. It is eternally and inalienably possessed of the Truth. Inthe last obscuration of Nature, in the lowest unintelligence ofMatter, it is this Will that is a concealed knowledge and compelsall these darkened movements to obey, as if mechanically, thedivine Law and adhere to the truth of their Nature. It is thiswhich makes the tree grow according to its seed and each actionbear its appropriate fruit. In the obscurity of man’s ignorance,— less than material Nature’s, yet greater, — it is this divine Willthat governs and guides, knows the sense of his blindness andthe goal of his aberration and out of the crooked workings of the


cosmic Falsehood in him evolves the progressive manifestationof the cosmic Truth. Alone of the brilliant Gods, he burns brightand has full vision in the darkness of Night no less than in thesplendours of day. The other gods are us.arbudhah. , wakers withthe Dawn.

Therefore is he the priest of the offering, strongest or mostapt for sacrifice, he who, all-powerful, follows always the lawof the Truth. We must remember that the oblation (havya) sig-nifies always action (karma) and each action of mind or bodyis regarded as a giving of our plenty into the cosmic being andthe cosmic intention. Agni, the divine Will, is that which standsbehind the human will in its works. In the conscient offering,he comes in front; he is the priest set in front (puro-hita), guidesthe oblation and determines its effectiveness.

By this self-guided Truth, by this knowledge that worksout as an unerring Will in the Cosmos, he fashions the gods inmortals. Agni manifests divine potentialities in a death-besiegedbody; Agni brings them to effective actuality and perfection. Hecreates in us the luminous forms of the Immortals.

This work he does as a cosmic Power labouring upon therebellious human material even when in our ignorance we resistthe heavenward impulse and, accustomed to offer our actionsto the egoistic life, cannot yet or as yet will not make the divinesurrender. But it is in proportion as we learn to subjugate the egoand compel it to bow down in every act to the universal Beingand to serve consciously in its least movements the supreme Will,that Agni himself takes form in us. The Divine Will becomespresent and conscient in a human mind and enlightens it withthe divine Knowledge. Thus it is that man can be said to formby his toil the great Gods.

The Sanskrit expression is here a kr.n. udhvam. The prepo-sition gives the idea of a drawing upon oneself of somethingoutside and the working or shaping it out in our own conscious-ness. A kr. corresponds to the converse expression, a bhu, usedof the gods when they approach the mortal with the contactof Immortality and, divine form of godhead falling on formof humanity, “become”, take shape, as it were, in him. The

282 Selected Hymns

cosmic Powers act and exist in the universe; man takes themupon himself, makes an image of them in his own conscious-ness and endows that image with the life and power that theSupreme Being has breathed into His own divine forms andworld-energies.4

It is when thus present and conscient in the mortal, likea “house-lord”,5 master in his mansion, that Agni appears inthe true nature of his divinity. When we are obscure and re-volt against the Truth and the Law, our progress seems to be astumbling from ignorance to ignorance and is full of pain anddisturbance. By constant submission to the Truth, surrenderings,namobhih. , we create in ourselves that image of the divine Willwhich is on the contrary full of peace, because it is assured of theTruth and the Law. Equality of soul6 created by the surrender tothe universal Wisdom gives us a supreme peace and calm. Andsince that Wisdom guides all our steps in the straight paths ofthe Truth we are carried by it beyond all stumblings (duritani).

Moreover, with Agni conscious in our humanity, the cre-ation of the gods in us becomes a veritable manifestation andno longer a veiled growth. The will within grows conscious ofthe increasing godhead, awakens to the process, perceives thelines of the growth. Human action intelligently directed anddevoted to the universal Powers, ceases to be a mechanical,involuntary or imperfect offering; the thinking and observingmind participates and becomes the instrument of the sacrificialwill.

Agni is the power of conscious Being, called by us will,effective behind the workings of mind and body. Agni is thestrong God within (maryah. , the strong, the masculine) who putsout his strength against all assailing powers, who forbids inertia,who repels every failing of heart and of force, who spurns out alllack of manhood. Agni actualises what might otherwise remainas an ineffectual thought or aspiration. He is the doer of the

4 This is the true sense and theory of Hindu image-worship, which is thus a materialrendering of the great Vedic symbols.5 Gr.hapati; also vispati, lord or king in the creature.6 Samata of the Gita.


Yoga (sadhu); divine smith labouring at his forge, he hammersout our perfection. Here he is said to become the charioteerof the Supreme. The Supreme and Wonderful that moves andfulfils Itself “in the consciousness of another”,7 (we have thesame word, adbhuta, as in the colloquy of Indra and Agastya),effects that motion with this Power as charioteer holding thereins of the activity. Mitra also, the lord of Love and Lightis even such a charioteer. Love illuminated fulfils the harmonywhich is the goal of the divine movement. But the power of thislord of Will and Light is also needed. Force and Love united andboth illumined by Knowledge fulfil God in the world.

Will is the first necessity, the chief actualising force. Whentherefore the race of mortals turn consciously towards the greataim and, offering their enriched capacities to the Sons of Heaven,seek to form the divine in themselves, it is to Agni, first and chief,that they lift the realising thought, frame the creative Word. Forthey are the Aryans who do the work and accept the effort, —the vastest of all works, the most grandiose of all efforts, — andhe is the power that embraces Action and by Action fulfils thework. What is the Aryan without the divine Will that accepts thelabour and the battle, works and wins, suffers and triumphs?

Therefore it is this Will which annihilates all forces com-missioned to destroy the effort, this strongest of all the divinePuissances in which the supreme Purusha has imaged Himself,that must bestow its presence on these human vessels. There itwill use the mind as instrument of the sacrifice and by its verypresence manifest those inspired and realising Words which areas a chariot framed for the movement of the gods, giving to theThought that meditates the illuminative comprehension whichallows the forms of the divine Powers to outline themselves inour waking consciousness.

Then may those other mighty Ones who bring with themthe plenitudes of the higher life, Indra and the Ashwins, Ushaand Surya, Varuna and Mitra and Aryaman, assume with thatformative extension of themselves in the human being their most

7 R.V. I.170.1.

284 Selected Hymns

brilliant energies. Let them create their plenty in us, pouring itforth from the secret places of our being so as to be utilisable inits daylight tracts and let their impulsions urge upward the div-inising thought in Mind, till it transfigures itself in the supremelustres.

The hymn closes. Thus, in inspired words, has the divineWill, Agni, been affirmed by the sacred chant of the Gotamas.The Rishi uses his name and that of his house as a symbol-word; we have in it the Vedic go in the sense “luminous”, andGotama means “entirely possessed of light”. For it is only thosethat have the plenitude of the luminous intelligence by whomthe master of divine Truth can be wholly received and affirmedin this world of an inferior Ray, — gotamebhir r.tava. And it isupon those whose minds are pure, clear and open, vipra, thatthere can dawn the right knowledge of the great Births whichare behind the physical world and from which it derives andsupports its energies, — viprebhir jatavedah. .

Agni is Jatavedas, knower of the births, the worlds. Heknows entirely the five worlds8 and is not confined in his con-sciousness to this limited and dependent physical harmony. Hehas access even to the three highest states9 of all, to the udderof the mystic Cow,10 the abundance of the Bull11 with the fourhorns. From that abundance he will foster the illumination inthese Aryan seekers, swell the plenty of their divine faculties. Bythat fullness and plenty of his illumined perceptions he will unitethought with thought, word with word, till the human Intelli-gence is rich and harmonious enough to support and becomethe divine Idea.

8 The worlds in which, respectively, Matter, Life-Energy, Mind, Truth and Beatitudeare the essential energies. They are called respectively Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, Mahas andJana or Mayas.9 Divine Being, Consciousness, Bliss, — Sachchidananda.

10 Aditi, the infinite Consciousness, Mother of the worlds.11 The divine Purusha, Sachchidananda; the three highest states and Truth are his fourhorns.

V

Surya Savitri, Creator and Increaser

Rig Veda V.81

y� 8jt� mn ut y� 8jt� EDyo Ev A Ev �y b� hto EvpE�ct� Ev ho�A dD� vy� nAEvd�k imhF d�v�y sEvt� � pEr�V� Et� � ��

1. Men illumined yoke their mind and they yoke their thoughtsto him who is illumination and largeness and clear perceiv-ing. Knowing all phenomena he orders, sole, the Energies ofthe sacrifice. Vast is the affirmation in all things of Savitri,the divine Creator.

Ev9A #pAEZ Et m� 8ct� kEv� AsAvFd� Bd�� E�pd� ct� �pd� Ev nAkmHyt� sEvtA vr� yo�n� yAZm� qso Ev rAjEt � ��

2. All forms he takes unto himself, the Seer, and he createsfrom them good for the twofold existence and the fourfold.The Creator, the supreme Good, manifests Heaven whollyand his light pervades all as he follows the march of theDawn.

y�y yAZmvy id� yy� d�'vA d�v�y mEhmAnmojsA y� pAET'vAEn Evmm� s etfo rjA�Es d�v� sEvtA mEh�vnA � ��

3. In the wake of his march the other gods also reach by hisforce to the greatness of the Divinity. He has mapped outthe realms of earthly light by his mightiness, — the brilliantone, the divine Creator.

ut yAEs sEvt��FEZ rocnot s� y'�y rE�mEB� sm� QyEs ut rA�Fm� Byt� prFys ut Em�o BvEs d�v Dm'EB� � ��

286 Selected Hymns

4. And thou reachest, O Savitri, to the three luminous heavens;and thou art utterly expressed by the rays of the Sun; andthou encompassest the Night upon either side; and thoubecomest by the law of thy actions the lord of Love, O God.

ut�Efq� sv�y �vm�k id� t p� qA BvEs d�v yAmEB� ut�d� Ev9� B� vn� Ev rAjEs �yAvA9�t� sEvt� �tommAnf� � "�

5. And thou art powerful for every creation; and thou be-comest the Increaser, O God, by thy movings; and thouilluminest utterly all this world of becomings. Shyavashwahas attained to the affirmation of thee, O Savitri.1

COMMENTARY

Indra with his shining hosts, the Maruts, Agni, the divine force,fulfiller of the Aryan sacrifice, are the most important deities ofthe Vedic system. Agni is the beginning and the end. This Willthat is knowledge is the initiator of the upward effort of themortal towards Immortality; to this divine consciousness that isone with divine power we arrive as the foundation of immortalexistence. Indra, lord of Swar, the luminous intelligence intowhich we have to convert our obscure material mentality inorder to become capable of the divine consciousness, is our chiefhelper. It is by the aid of Indra and the Maruts that the conversionis effected. The Maruts take our animal consciousness made upof the impulses of the nervous mentality, possess these impulseswith their illuminations and drive them up the hill of beingtowards the world of Swar and the truths of Indra. Our mentalevolution begins with these animal troops, these “Pashus”; theybecome, as we progress in the ascension, the brilliant herds ofthe Sun, gavah. , rays, the divine cows of the Veda. Such is thepsychological sense of the Vedic symbol.

1 For a good idiomatic and literary translation, rendering the sense and rhythm of theoriginal, a certain freedom in turning the Sanskrit is necessary. I have therefore given amore literal version of its phrases in the body of the Commentary.

Surya Savitri, Creator and Increaser 287

But who, then, is Surya, the Sun, from whom these raysproceed? He is the Master of Truth, Surya the Illuminator, Sav-itri the Creator, Pushan the Increaser. His rays in their ownnature are supramental activities of revelation, inspiration, in-tuition, luminous discernment, and they constitute the action ofthat transcendent principle which the Vedanta calls Vijnana, theperfect knowledge, the Veda Ritam, the Truth. But these raysdescend also into the human mentality and form at its summitthe world of luminous intelligence, Swar, of which Indra is thelord.

For this Vijnana is a divine and not a human faculty. Man’smind is not constituted of the self-luminous truth, like the divinemind; it is a sense-mentality, Manas, which can receive and un-derstand2 Truth, but is not one with it. The light of knowledgehas to present itself in this human understanding tempered so asto suit its forms to the capacities and limitations of the physicalconsciousness. And it has to lead up progressively to its own truenature, to manifest successive evolutionary stages for our mentaldevelopment. Therefore the rays of Surya, as they labour to formour mental existence, create three successive worlds of mentalityone superimposed on the other, — the sensational, aesthetic andemotional mind, the pure intellect and the divine intelligence.The fullness and perfection of these triple worlds of mind existsonly in the pure mental plane of being,3 where they shine abovethe three heavens, tisro divah. , as their three luminosities, trın. irocanani. But their light descends upon the physical conscious-ness and effects the corresponding formations in its realms, theVedic parthivani rajamsi, earthly realms of light. They also aretriple, tisrah. pr.thivıh. , the three earths. And of all these worldsSurya Savitri is the creator.

We have in this figure of various psychological levels, eachconsidered as a world in itself, a key to the conceptions of the

2 The Vedic word for the understanding is dhı, that which receives and holds inplace.3 Our natural plane of being is obviously the physical consciousness, but the others

also are open to us since part of our being lives in each of them.

288 Selected Hymns

Vedic Rishis. The human individual is an organised unit of ex-istence which reflects the constitution of the universe. It repeatsin itself the same arrangement of states and play of forces. Man,subjectively, contains in himself all the worlds in which, ob-jectively, he is contained. Preferring ordinarily a concrete to anabstract language, the Rishis speak of the physical consciousnessas the physical world, earth, Bhu, Prithivi. They describe thepure mental consciousness as heaven, Dyaus, of which Swar, theluminous mind, is the summit. To the intermediate dynamic,vital or nervous consciousness they give the name either ofAntariksha, the intermediate vision, or of Bhuvar, — multipledynamic worlds formative of the Earth.

For in the idea of the Rishis a world is primarily a formationof consciousness and only secondarily a physical formation ofthings. A world is a loka, a way in which conscious being imagesitself. And it is the causal Truth, represented in the person ofSurya Savitri, that is the creator of all its forms. For it is thecausal Idea in the infinite being, — the idea, not abstract, butreal and dynamic, — that originates the law, the energies, theformations of things and the working out of their potentialitiesin determined forms by determined processes. Because the causalIdea is a real force of existence, it is called Satyam, the True inbeing; because it is the determining truth of all activity andformation, it is called Ritam, the True in movement; becauseit is broad and infinite in its self-view, in its scope and in itsoperation, it is called Brihat, the Large or Vast.

Savitri by the Truth is the Creator, but not in the sense ofa fabrication or mechanical forming of things. The root of theword means an impulsion, a loosing forth or sending out, — thesense also of the ordinary word for creation, sr.s.t.i, — and so aproduction. The action of the causal Idea does not fabricate, butbrings out by Tapas, by the pressure of consciousness on its ownbeing, that which is concealed in it, latent in potentiality and intruth already existent in the Beyond.

Now the forces and processes of the physical world repeat,as in a symbol, the truths of the supraphysical action whichproduced it. And since it is by the same forces and the same


processes, one in the physical worlds and the supraphysical,that our inner life and its development are governed, the Rishisadopted the phenomena of physical Nature as just symbols forthose functionings of the inner life which it was their difficulttask to indicate in the concrete language of a sacred poetry thatmust at the same time serve for the external worship of the Godsas powers of the visible universe. The solar energy is the physicalform of Surya, Lord of Light and Truth; it is through the Truththat we arrive at Immortality, final aim of the Vedic discipline.It is therefore under the images of the Sun and its rays, of Dawnand day and night and the life of man between the two poles oflight and darkness that the Aryan seers represent the progressiveillumination of the human soul. It is so that Shyavashwa of thehouse of Atri hymns Savitri, Creator, Increaser, Revealer.

Surya enlightens the mind and the thoughts with the illu-minations of the Truth. He is vipra, the illumined. It is hewho delivers the individual human mind from the circumscribedconsciousness of self and environment and enlarges the limitedmovement which is imposed on it by its preoccupation withits own individuality. Therefore he is br.hat, the Large. But hisillumination is not a vague light, nor does his largeness comeby a confused and dissolved view of self and object; it holdsin itself a clear discernment of things in their totality, theirparts and their relations. Therefore he is vipascit, the clear inperception. Men as soon as they begin to receive somethingof this solar illumination, strive to yoke their whole mentalityand its thought-contents to the conscious existence of the divineSurya within them. That is to say, they apply, as it were, all theirobscure mental state and all their erring thoughts to this Lightmanifested in them so that it may turn the obscurity of the mindinto clearness and convert the errors of thought into those truthswhich they distortedly represent. This yoking (yunjate) becomestheir Yoga. “They yoke the mind, and they yoke their thoughts,the enlightened, of (i.e. to, or so that they may be part of orbelong to) the Enlightened, the Large, the Clear-perceptioned.”

Then the Lord of Truth orders all the human energies offeredup to him in the terms of the Truth; for he becomes in man a sole

290 Selected Hymns

and sovereign Power governing all knowledge and action. Notinterfered with by conflicting agencies, he governs perfectly; forhe knows all manifestations, comprehends their causes, containstheir law and process, compels their right result. There are sevenof these sacrificial energies (Hotras) in the human being, onecorresponding to each of the seven constituents of his psycho-logical existence, — body, life, mind, super-mind, bliss, will andessential being. Their irregular action or wrong relation, causedand maintained by the obscuration of knowledge in Mind, is thesource of all stumbling and unhappiness, of all evil act and evilstate. Surya, Lord of Knowledge, puts each of them to its rightplace in the Sacrifice. “Knower of phenomena sole he arrangesthe sacrificial energies.”

Man thus arrives at a vast and all-embracing affirmationin himself of this divine Creator. It is implied in this passageand indicated more clearly in the next verse that the result is aright and happy creation — for all our existence is a constantcreation — of the universe of man’s whole being. “Vast is thecomprehensive affirmation of the god Savitri.”

Surya is the seer, the revealer. His Truth takes into its illu-mination all forms of things, all the phenomenal objects andexperiences which constitute our world, all the figures of theuniversal Consciousness within and without us. It reveals thetruth in them, their sense, their purpose, their justification andright use. Ordering rightly the energies of the sacrifice it createsor produces good as the law of our whole existence. For allthings have their justifiable cause of being, their good use andtheir right enjoyment. When this truth in them is found andutilised, all things produce good for the soul, increase its welfare,enlarge its felicity. And this divine revolution is effected both inthe lower physical existence and in the more complete inner lifewhich uses the physical for its manifestation. “The Seer takes tohimself all forms, he brings out (creates or manifests) good forthe twofold (two-footed), for the fourfold (four-footed).”4

4 The symbolism of the words dvipade and catus.pade may be differently interpreted.The discussion of it here would occupy too large a space.


The process of this new creation is described in the rest ofthe hymn. Surya, as the creator, as the supreme good, manifestsin our human consciousness its concealed heavenly summit onthe levels of the pure mind, and we are able to look up abovefrom the earth of our physical existence and are delivered fromthe obscurities of the night of Ignorance. He follows, sunlike,the march of the Dawn, illuminating all the regions of our beingon which falls its light; for there is always needed the precursorymental illumination before the Truth itself, the supramental prin-ciple, can take possession of this lower existence. “The creator,the supremely desirable, manifests all heaven and shines pervad-ingly following (after or according to) the movement forward ofthe Dawn.”

All the other gods follow in this march of Surya and theyattain to his vastness by the force of his illumination. That is tosay, all the other divine faculties or potentialities in man expandwith the expansion of the Truth and Light in him; in the strengthof the ideal super-mind they attain to the same infinite amplitudeof right becoming, right action and right knowledge. The Truthin its largeness moulds all into the terms of the infinite anduniversal Life, replaces with it the limited individual existence,maps out in the terms of their real being the realms of the physi-cal consciousness which, as Savitri, it has created. This also is inus a creation, although in reality it only manifests what alreadyexists but was concealed by the darkness of our ignorance, —just as the realms of the physical earth are concealed from oureyes by the darkness, but reveal themselves as the sun in hismarch follows the Dawn and measures them out one by one tothe vision. “Following whose march the other gods too reachthe vastness of the divinity by his strength, he who maps outentirely — that brilliant one — the earthly realms of light, thegod Savitri, by his greatness.”

But it is not only the full capacity of our physical or earthlyconsciousness that this divine Truth illuminates and forms fora perfect action. It pervades the three luminous realms of thepure mind (trın. i rocana); it puts us in contact with all the divinepossibilities of the sensations and emotions, of the intellect, of

292 Selected Hymns

the intuitive reason and liberating the superior faculties fromtheir limitation and constant reference to the material world ful-fils our entire mental being. Its activities receive their completestmanifestation; they are gathered up into the life of the completeTruth by the rays of the sun, that is to say, by the full splendourof the divine Super-Mind manifested in us. “And thou goest,O Savitri, to the three luminousnesses, and thou art perfectlyexpressed by the rays of the Sun (or, art gathered together bymeans of the rays).”

Then it is that the higher kingdom of the Immortality, Sach-chidananda revealed, shines out perfectly in this world. Thehigher and lower are reconciled in the light of the supra-mentalrevelation. The Ignorance, the Night, is illumined upon bothsides of our complete being, not only as in our present stateupon one. This higher kingdom stands confessed in the prin-ciple of Beatitude which is for us the principle of Love andLight, represented by the god Mitra. The Lord of Truth, whenhe reveals himself in the full godhead, becomes the Lord ofBliss. The law of his being, the principle regulating his activitiesis seen to be Love; for in the right arrangement of knowledge andaction everything here comes to be translated into terms of good,felicity, bliss. “And thou encompassest Night upon both sides,and thou becomest, O God, Mitra by the laws of thy action.”

The Truth of the divine existence becomes eventually thesole Lord of all creation in ourselves; and by his constant vis-itations or by his continual progressions the Creator becomesthe Increaser, Savitri becomes Pushan. He aggrandises us by aconstantly progressive creation until he has illumined the wholeworld of our becoming. We grow into the complete, the uni-versal, the infinite. So has Shyavashwa, of the sons of Atri,succeeded in affirming Savitri in his own being as the illuminativeTruth, the creative, the progressive, the increaser of man — hewho brings him out of egoistic limitation into universality, outof the finite into the infinite. “And thou hast power alone forcreation; and thou becomest the Increaser, O God, by the goings;and thou illuminest entirely all this world (literally, becoming).Shyavashwa has attained to the affirmation of thee, O Savitri.”

VI

The Divine Dawn

Rig Veda III.61

uqo vAj�n vAEjEn c�tA� �tom� j� q�v g� Zto mGoEn p� rAZF d�Ev y� vEt� p� r�EDrn� v�t� crEs Ev9vAr� � ��

1. Dawn, richly stored with substance, conscious cleave tothe affirmation of him who expresses thee, O thou of theplenitudes. Goddess, ancient, yet ever young thou movestmany-thoughted following the law of thy activities, O bearerof every boon.

uqo d�4ym�yA' Ev BAEh cd� rTA s� n� tA IrytF aA �vA vht� s� ymAso a9A Ehr yvZA: p� T� pAjso y� � ��

2. Dawn divine, shine out immortal in thy car of happy lightsending forth the pleasant voices of the Truth. May steedswell-guided bear thee here who are golden brilliant of hueand wide their might.

uq� tFcF B� vnAEn Ev9o2vA' Et�W�ym� t�y k�t� � smAnmT: crZFymAnA c+Emv n4y�yA vv� ��v � ��

3. Dawn, confronting all the worlds thou standest high-uplifted and art their perception of Immortality; do thoumove over them like a wheel, O new Day, travelling overan equal field.

av �y� m�v EcvtF mGoy� qA yAEt �vsr�y p$F �vj'ntF s� BgA s� d�sA aAtAE;v� p T aA p� ET4yA� � ��

294 Selected Hymns

4. Dawn in her plenitude like one that lets fall from her a sewnrobe moves, the bride of the Bliss; creating Swar, perfect inher working, perfect in her enjoying, she widens from theextremity of Heaven over the earth.

aQCA vo d�vFm� qs� EvBAtF� vo Br2v� nmsA s� v� E/tm� U2v: mD� DA EdEv pAjo a)�t� rocnA zzc� r vs�d� k� � "�

5. Meet ye the Dawn as she shines wide towards you and withsurrender bring forward your complete energy. Exalted inheaven is the force to which she rises establishing the sweet-ness; she makes the luminous worlds to shine forth and is avision of felicity.

!tAvrF Edvo ak�'rbo2yA r�vtF rodsF Ec�m�TAt� aAytFm�n uqs� EvBAtF� vAmm�Eq d� EvZ� EB0mAZ� � (�

6. By heaven’s illuminings one perceives her a bearer of theTruth and rapturous she comes with its varied light into thetwo firmaments. From Dawn as she approaches shining outon thee, O Agni, thou seekest and attainest to the substanceof delight.

!t�y b� < uqsAEmq yn� v� qA mhF rodsF aA Evv�f mhF Em��y vzZ�y mAyA cd��v BAn�� Ev dD� p� z�A � *�

7. Putting forth his impulsions in the foundation of the Truth,in the foundation of the Dawns, their Lord enters the Vast-ness of the firmaments. Vast the wisdom of Varuna, of Mitra,as in a happy brightness, orders multitudinously the Light.

COMMENTARY

Surya Savitri in his task of illumination follows the progress ofthe Dawn. In another hymn the movements of the mind havebeen described as growing conscient and brilliant by the bright

The Divine Dawn 295

power of the continuous Dawns. Throughout the Veda Usha,daughter of Heaven, has always the same function. She is themedium of the awakening, the activity and the growth of theother gods; she is the first condition of the Vedic realisation. Byher increasing illumination the whole nature of man is clarified;through her he arrives at the Truth, through her he enjoys theBeatitude. The divine dawn of the Rishis is the advent of thedivine Light throwing off veil after veil and revealing in man’sactivities the luminous godhead. In that light the Work is done,the sacrifice offered and its desirable fruits gathered by humanity.

Many are the hymns, indeed, in which rich and beautifulfigures of the earthly dawn veil this inner truth of the god-dess Usha, but in this hymn of the great Rishi Vishwamitra thepsychological symbolism of the Vedic Dawn is apparent frombeginning to end by open expressions and on the surface of thethought. “O Dawn rich of store in thy substance,” he cries toher, “conscient cleave to the affirmation of him who expressesthee, O thou who hast the plenitudes.” The word pracetas andthe related word, vicetas, are standing terms of Vedic phrase-ology; they seem to correspond to the ideas expressed in laterlanguage by the Vedantic prajnana and vijnana. Prajnana is theconsciousness that cognizes all things as objects confronting itsobservation; in the divine mind it is knowledge regarding thingsas their source, possessor and witness. Vijnana is comprehensiveknowledge containing, penetrating into things, pervading themin consciousness by a sort of identification with their truth. Ushais to occupy the revealing thought and word of the Rishi as apower of Knowledge conscient of the truth of all that is placedby them before the mind for expression in man. The affirma-tion, it is suggested, will be full and ample; for Usha is vajenavajini, maghoni; rich is the store of her substance; she has all theplenitudes.

This dawn moves in her progression always according tothe rule of a divine action; many are the thoughts she brings inthat motion, but her steps are sure and all desirable things, allsupreme boons, the boons of the Ananda, the blessings of thedivine existence, — are in her hands. She is ancient and eternal,

296 Selected Hymns

the dawn of the Light that was from the beginning, puran. ı, butin her coming she is ever young and fresh to the soul that receivesher.

She is to shine wide, she that is the divine Dawn, as thelight of the immortal existence bringing out in man the powersor the voices of Truth and Joy, (sunr.tah. , — a word which ex-presses at once both the true and the pleasant); for is not thechariot of her movement a car at once of light and of happi-ness? For again, the word candra in candraratha, — signifyingalso the lunar deity Soma, lord of the delight of immortalitypouring into man, ananda and amr.ta, — means both luminousand blissful. And the horses that bring her, figure of the nervousforces that support and carry forward all our action, must beperfectly controlled; golden, bright in hue, their nature (for inthis ancient symbolism colour is the sign of quality, of character,of temperament) must be a dynamism of ideal knowledge in itsconcentrated luminousness; wide in its extension must be themass of that concentrated force, — pr.thupajaso ye.

Divine Dawn comes thus to the soul with the light of herknowledge, prajnana, confronting all the worlds as field of thatknowledge, — all provinces, that is to say, of our universal be-ing, — mind, vitality, physical consciousness. She stands upliftedover them on our heights above mind, in the highest heaven,as the perception of Immortality or of the Immortal, amr.tasyaketuh. , revealing in them the eternal and beatific existence or theeternal all-blissful Godhead. So exalted she stands prepared toeffect the motion of the divine knowledge, progressing as a newrevelation of the eternal truth, navyasi, in their harmonised andequalised activities like a wheel moving smoothly over a levelfield; for they now, their diversities and discords removed, offerno obstacle to that equal motion.

In her plenitude she separates, as it were, and casts downfrom her the elaborately sewn garment that covered the truthof things and moves as the wife of the Lover, the energy ofher all-blissful Lord, svasarasya patnı. Full in her enjoymentof the felicity, full in her effectuation of all activities, subhagasudamsah. , she brings into existence in us by her revelations

The Divine Dawn 297

Swar, the concealed luminous mind, our highest mental heaven;and thus from the farthest extremities of mental being extendsherself over the physical consciousness.

As this divine Dawn pours out widely its light upon them, sohave men by submission to the law of her divine act and move-ment to bring forward for her the fully energised completenessof their being and their capacities as a vehicle for her light or asa seat for her sacrificial activities.

The Rishi then dwells on the two capital works of the divineDawn in man, — her elevation of him to the full force of theLight and the revelation of the Truth and her pouring of theAnanda, the Amrita, the Soma Wine, the bliss of the immortalbeing into the mental and bodily existence. In the world of thepure mind, divi, she rises into the full force and mass of theLight, urdhvam pajo asret, and from those pure and high levelsshe establishes the sweetness, madhu, the honey of Soma. Shemakes to shine out the three luminous worlds, rocana; she isthen or she brings with her the beatific vision. By the effectualilluminations of the pure mentality, through the realising Word,divo arkaih. , she is perceived as the bearer of Truth and withthe Truth she enters from the world above Mind, full of thedelight, in a varied play of her multiple thought and activity,into the mental and bodily consciousness, those established lim-its between which man’s action moves. It is from her, as shecomes thus richly laden, vajena vajini, that Agni, the divineForce labouring here in body and mind to uplift the mortal,prays for and attains to the Soma, the wine of the Beatitude, thedelightful substance.

The supramental world in us, foundation of the Truth, isthe foundation of the Dawns. They are the descent upon mortalnature of the light of that immortal Truth, r.tam jyotis. The Lordof the Dawns, Master of Truth, Illuminer, Creator, Organiser,putting forth in the foundation of Truth, above mind, the im-pulsion of his activities, enters with them by this goddess intoa bodily and mental existence no longer obscured but releasedfrom their limits and capable of vastness, mahı rodası. The Lordof Truth is the sole lord of things. He is Varuna, soul of vastness

298 Selected Hymns

and purity; he is Mitra, source of love and light and harmony.His creative Wisdom, mahı mitrasya varun. asya maya, unlimitedin its scope, — for he is Varuna, — appearing, candreva, as alight of bliss and joy, — for he is Mitra, — arranges, perfectlyorganises, in multitudinous forms, in the wideness of the liber-ated nature, the luminous expansions, the serene expressions ofthe Truth. He combines the various brilliancies with which hisDawn has entered our firmaments; he blends into one harmonyher true and happy voices.

Dawn divine is the coming of the Godhead. She is the lightof the Truth and the Felicity pouring on us from the Lord ofWisdom and Bliss, amr.tasya ketuh. , svasarasya patnı.

VII

To Bhaga Savitri, the Enjoyer

Rig Veda V.82

t�sEvt� v�'ZFmh� vy� d�v�y Bojnm� )�=� sv'DAtm� t� r� Bg�y DFmEh � ��

1. Of Savitri divine we embrace that enjoying, that which isthe best, rightly disposes all, reaches the goal, even Bhaga’s,we hold by the thought.

a�y Eh �vyf�tr� sEvt� � k>n E ym� n EmnEt �vrA?ym� � ��

2. For of him no pleasure in things can they diminish, for tooself-victorious is it, nor the self-empire of this Enjoyer.

s Eh r$AEn dAf� q� s� vAEt sEvtA Bg� t� BAg� Ec�mFmh� � ��

3. ’Tis he that sends forth the delights on the giver, the godwho is the bringer forth of things; that varied richness of hisenjoyment we seek.

a%A no d�v sEvt� jAv�sAvF� sOBgm� prA d� ��v@y� s� v � ��

4. Today, O divine Producer, send forth on us fruitful felicity,dismiss what belongs to the evil dream.

Ev�vAEn d�v sEvtd�'ErtAEn prA s� v yd� Bd�� t� aAs� v � "�

300 Selected Hymns

5. All evils, O divine Producer, dismiss; what is good, that sendforth on us.

anAgso aEdty� d�v�y sEvt� � sv� Ev�vA vAmAEn DFmEh � (�

6. Blameless for infinite being in the outpouring of the divineProducer, we hold by the thought all things of delight.

aA Ev�vd�v� s�pEt� s� /t�r%A v� ZFmh� s�ysv� sEvtArm� � *�

7. The universal godhead and master of being we accept intoourselves by perfect words today, the Producer whose pro-duction is of the truth —

y im� uB� ahnF p� r e�y y� QCn� �vADFd�'v� sEvtA � ,�

8. He who goes in front of both this day and night neverfaltering, placing rightly his thought, the divine Producer —

y imA Ev�vA jAtAyA)AvyEt �lok�n c s� vAEt sEvtA � -�

9. He who by the rhythm makes heard of the knowledge allbirths and produces them, the divine Producer.

COMMENTARY

Four great deities constantly appear in the Veda as closely al-lied in their nature and in their action, Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga,Aryaman. Varuna and Mitra are continually coupled togetherin the thoughts of the Rishis; sometimes a trio appears together,Varuna, Mitra and Bhaga or Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman. Sepa-rate suktas addressed to any of these godheads are comparatively

To Bhaga Savitri, the Enjoyer 301

rare, although there are some important hymns of which Varunais the deity. But the Riks in which their names occur, whether inhymns to other gods or in invocations to the All-gods, the VisveDevah. , are by no means inconsiderable in number.

These four deities are, according to Sayana, solar powers,Varuna negatively as lord of the night, Mitra positively as lordof the day, Bhaga and Aryaman as names of the Sun. We neednot attach much importance to these particular identifications,but it is certain that a solar character attaches to all the four.In them that peculiar feature of the Vedic gods, their essentialoneness even in the play of their different personalities and func-tions, comes prominently to light. Not only are the four closelyassociated among themselves, but they seem to partake of eachother’s nature and attributes, and all are evidently emanationsof Surya Savitri, the divine being in his creative and illuminativesolar form.

Surya Savitri is the Creator. According to the Truth of things,in the terms of the Ritam, the worlds are brought forth fromthe divine consciousness, from Aditi, goddess of infinite being,mother of the gods, the indivisible consciousness, the Light thatcannot be impaired imaged by the mystic Cow that cannot beslain. In that creation, Varuna and Mitra, Aryaman and Bhagaare four effective Puissances. Varuna represents the principle ofpure and wide being, Sat in Sachchidananda; Aryaman repre-sents the light of the divine consciousness working as Force;Mitra representing light and knowledge, using the principle ofAnanda for creation, is Love maintaining the law of harmony;Bhaga represents Ananda as the creative enjoyment; he takes thedelight of the creation, takes the delight of all that is created.It is the Maya, the formative wisdom of Varuna, of Mitra thatdisposes multitudinously the light of Aditi brought by the Dawnto manifest the worlds.

In their psychological function these four gods representthe same principles working in the human mind, in the humantemperament. They build up in man the different planes of hisbeing and mould them ultimately into the terms and the formsof the divine Truth. Especially Mitra and Varuna are continually

302 Selected Hymns

described as holding firm the law of their action, increasing theTruth, touching the Truth and by the Truth enjoying its vastnessof divine will or its great and uncontracted sacrificial action.Varuna represents largeness, right and purity; everything thatdeviates from the right, from the purity recoils from his beingand strikes the offender as the punishment of sin. So long asman does not attain to the largeness of Varuna’s Truth, he isbound to the posts of the world-sacrifice by the triple bondsof mind, life and body as a victim and is not free as a pos-sessor and enjoyer. Therefore we have frequently the prayer tobe delivered from the noose of Varuna, from the wrath of hisoffended purity. Mitra is on the other hand the most beloved ofthe gods; he binds all together by the fixities of his harmony, bythe successive lustrous seats of Love fulfilling itself in the orderof things, mitrasya dhamabhih. . His name, Mitra, which meansalso friend, is constantly used with a play upon the double sense;it is as Mitra, because Mitra dwells in all, that the other godsbecome the friends of man. Aryaman appears in the Veda withbut little distinctness of personality, for the references to him arebrief. The functions of Bhaga are outlined more clearly and arethe same in the cosmos and in man.

In this hymn of Shyavashwa to Savitri we see both the func-tions of Bhaga and his oneness with Surya Savitri; for it is tothe creative Lord of Truth that the hymn is addressed, to Surya,but to Surya specifically in his form as Bhaga, as the Lord ofEnjoyment. The word bhaga means enjoyment or the enjoyerand that this sense is the one held especially appropriate to thedivine name, Bhaga, is emphasised by the use of bhojanam,bhaga, saubhagam in the verses of the hymn. Savitri, we haveseen, means Creator, but especially in the sense of producing,emitting from the unmanifest and bringing out into the man-ifest. Throughout the hymn there is a constant dwelling uponthis root-sense of the word which it is impossible to renderadequately in a translation. In the very first verse there is acovert play of the kind; for bhojanam means both enjoymentand food and it is intended to be conveyed that the “enjoymentof Savitri” is Soma, from the same root su, to produce, press


out, distil, Soma, the food of divine beings, the supreme distill-ing, highest production of the great Producer. What the Rishiseeks is the enjoyment in all created things of the immortal andimmortalising Ananda.

It is this Ananda which is that enjoyment of the divine Pro-ducer, of Surya Savitri, the supreme result of the Truth; for Truthis followed as the path to the divine beatitude. This Ananda isthe highest, the best enjoyment. It disposes all aright; for oncethe Ananda, the divine delight in all things is attained, it setsright all the distortions, all the evil of the world. It carries manthrough to the goal. If by the truth and right of things we arriveat the Ananda, by the Ananda also we can arrive at the rightand truth of things. It is to the divine Creator in the nameand form of Bhaga that this human capacity for the divine andright enjoyment of all things belongs. When he is embraced bythe human mind and heart and vital forces and physical being,when this divine form is received into himself by man, then theAnanda of the world manifests itself.

Nothing can limit, nothing can diminish, neither god nordemon, friend nor enemy, event nor sensation, whatever pleasurethis divine Enjoyer takes in things, in whatever vessel or objectof his enjoyment. For nothing can diminish or hedge in or hurthis luminous self-empire, svarajyam, his perfect possession ofhimself in infinite being, infinite delight and the vastnesses ofthe order of the Truth.

Therefore it is he that brings the seven delights, sapta ratna,to the giver of the sacrifice. He looses them forth on us; for theyare all there in the world as in the divine being, in ourselves also,and have only to be loosed forth on our outer consciousness. Therich and varied amplitude of this sevenfold delight, perfect onall the planes of our being, is the bhaga, enjoyment or portionof Bhaga Savitri in the completed sacrifice, and it is that variedwealth which the Rishi seeks for himself and his fellows in thesacrifice by the acceptance of the divine Enjoyer.

Shyavashwa then calls on Bhaga Savitri to vouchsafe to himeven today a felicity not barren, but full of the fruits of activity,rich in the offspring of the soul, prajavat saubhagam. Ananda is

304 Selected Hymns

creative, it is jana, the delight that gives birth to life and world;only let the things loosed forth on us be of the creation conceivedin the terms of the truth and let all that belongs to the falsehood,to the evil dream created by the ignorance of the divine Truth,duh. s.vapnyam, be dismissed, dispelled away from our consciousbeing.

In the next verse he makes clearer the sense of duh. s.vapnyam.What he desires to be dispelled is all evil, visvani duritani. Su-vitam and duritam in the Veda mean literally right going andwrong going. Suvitam is truth of thought and action, duritamerror or stumbling, sin and perversion. Suvitam is happy going,felicity, the path of Ananda; duritam is calamity, suffering, allill result of error and ill doing. All that is evil, visvani duritani,belongs to the evil dream that has to be turned away from us.Bhaga sends to us instead all that is good, — bhadram, good inthe sense of felicity, the auspicious things of the divine enjoying,the happiness of the right activity, the right creation.

For, in the creation of Bhaga Savitri, in his perfect and fault-less sacrifice, — there is a double sense in the word sava, “loosingforth”, used of the creation, and the sacrifice, the libation of theSoma, — men stand absolved from sin and blame by the Ananda,anagaso, blameless in the sight of Aditi, fit for the undivided andinfinite consciousness of the liberated soul. The Ananda owing tothat freedom is capable of being in them universal. They are ableto hold by their thought all things of the delight, visva vamani;for in the dhı, the understanding that holds and arranges, thereis right arrangement of the world, perception of right relation,right purpose, right use, right fulfilment, the divine and blissfulintention in all things.

It is the universal Divine, the master of the Sat, from whomall things are created in the terms of the truth, satyam, that thesacrificers today by means of the sacred mantras seek to acceptinto themselves under the name of Bhaga Savitri. It is the creatorwhose creation is the Truth, whose sacrifice is the outpouring ofthe truth through the outpouring of his own Ananda, his divineand unerring joy of being, into the human soul. He as SuryaSavitri, master of the Truth, goes in front of both this Night


and this Dawn, of the manifest consciousness and the unmani-fest, the waking being and the subconscient and superconscientwhose interaction creates all our experiences; and in his motionhe neglects nothing, is never unheeding, never falters. He goesin front of both bringing out of the night of the subconscient thedivine Light, turning into the beams of that Light the uncertainor distorted reflections of the conscient, and always the thoughtis rightly placed. The source of all error is misapplication, wrongplacing of truth, wrong arrangement, wrong relation, wrongpositing in time and place, object and order. But in the Masterof Truth there is no such error, no such stumbling, no such wrongplacing.

Surya Savitri, who is Bhaga, stands between the Infiniteand the created worlds within us and without. All things thathave to be born in the creative consciousness he receives intothe Vijnana; there he puts it into its right place in the divinerhythm by the knowledge that listens and receives the Word asit descends and so he looses it forth into the movement of things,asravayati slokena pra ca suvati. When in us each creation ofthe active Ananda, the prajavat saubhagam, comes thus out ofthe unmanifest, received and heard rightly of the knowledgein the faultless rhythm of things, then is our creation that ofBhaga Savitri, and all the births of that creation, our children,our offspring, praja, apatyam, are things of the delight, visvavamani. This is the accomplishment of Bhaga in man, his fullportion of the world-sacrifice.

VIII

Vayu, the Master of the Life Energies

Rig Veda IV.48

EvEh ho�A avFtA Evpo n rAyo ay'� vAyvA cd��Z rT�n yAEh s� t�y pFty� � ��

1. Do thou manifest the sacrificial energies that are unmani-fested, even as a revealer of felicity and doer of the work; OVayu, come in thy car of happy light to the drinking of theSoma wine.

Eny�'vAZo af�tFEn'y� �vA& id� sArET� vAyvA cd��Z rT�n yAEh s� t�y pFty� � ��

2. Put away from thee all denials of expression and with thysteeds of the yoking, with Indra for thy charioteer come, OVayu, in thy car of happy light to the drinking of the Somawine.

an� k� �Z� vs� EDtF y�mAt� Ev�vp�fsA vAyvA cd��Z rT�n yAEh s� t�y pFty� � ��

3. The two that, dark, yet hold all substances, shall observethee in their labour, they in whom are all forms. O Vayu,come in thy car of happy light to the drinking of the Somawine.

vht� �vA mnoy� jo y� /tAso nvEtn'v vAyvA cd��Z rT�n yAEh s� t�y pFty� � ��

Vayu, the Master of the Life Energies 307

4. Yoked let the ninety and nine bear thee, they who are yokedby the mind. O Vayu, come in thy car of happy light to thedrinking of the Soma wine.

vAyo ft� hrFZA� y� v�v po�yAZAm� ut vA t� shE5Zo rT aA yAt� pAjsA � "�

5. Yoke, O Vayu, thy hundred brilliant steeds that shall in-crease, or else with thy thousand let thy chariot arrive in themass of its force.

COMMENTARY

The psychological conceptions of the Vedic Rishis have often amarvellous profundity and nowhere more than when they dealwith the phenomenon of the conscious activities of mind and lifeemerging out of the subconscient. It may be said, even, that thisidea is the whole basis of the rich and subtle philosophy evolvedin that early dawn of knowledge by these inspired Mystics. Norhas any other expressed it with a greater subtlety and felicitythan the Rishi Vamadeva, at once one of the most profoundseers and one of the sweetest singers of the Vedic age. One ofhis hymns, the last of the fourth Mandala, is indeed the mostimportant key we possess to the symbolism which hid behind thefigures of the sacrifice those realities of psychological experienceand perception deemed so sacred by the Aryan forefathers.

In that hymn Vamadeva speaks of the ocean of the sub-conscient which underlies all our life and activities. Out of thatocean rises “the honeyed wave” of sensational existence withits undelivered burden of unrealised delight climbing full of the“Ghrita” and the “Soma”, the clarified mental consciousnessand the illumined Ananda that descends from above, to theheaven of Immortality. The “secret Name” of the mental con-sciousness, the tongue with which the gods taste the world, thenexus of Immortality, is the Ananda which the Soma symbol-ises. For all this creation has been, as it were, ejected into thesubconscient by the four-horned Bull, the divine Purusha whose

308 Selected Hymns

horns are infinite Existence, Consciousness, Bliss and Truth. Inimages of an energetic incongruity reminding us of the sublimegrotesques and strange figures that have survived from the oldmystic and symbolic art of the prehistoric world, Vamadevadescribes the Purusha in the figure of a man-bull, whose fourhorns are the four divine principles, his three feet or three legsthe three human principles, mentality, vital dynamism and ma-terial substance, his two heads the double consciousness of Souland Nature, Purusha and Prakriti, his seven hands the sevennatural activities corresponding to the seven principles. “Triplybound” — bound in the mind, bound in the life-energies, boundin the body — “the Bull roars aloud; great is the Divinity thathas entered into mortals.”

For the “ghritam”, the clear light of the mentality reflectingthe Truth, has been hidden by the Panis, the lords of the lowersense-activity, and shut up in the subconscient; in our thoughts,in our desires, in our physical consciousness the Light and theAnanda have been triply established, but they are concealedfrom us. It is in the cow, symbol of the Light from above, that thegods find the clarified streams of the “ghritam”. These streams,says the Rishi, rise from the heart of things, from the ocean ofthe subconscient, hr.dyat samudrat, but they are confined in ahundred pens by the enemy, Vritra, so that they may be keptfrom the eye of discernment, from the knowledge that laboursin us to enlighten that which is concealed and deliver that whichis imprisoned. They move in the path on the borders of thesubconscient, dense if impetuous in their movements, limitedby the nervous action, in small formations of the life-energyVayu, vatapramiyah. . Purified progressively by the experiences ofthe conscious heart and mind, these energies of Nature becomefinally capable of the marriage with Agni, the divine Will-force,which breaks down their boundaries and is himself nourishedby their now abundant waves. That is the crisis of the being bywhich the mortal nature prepares its conversion to immortality.

In the last verse of the hymn Vamadeva describes the wholeof existence as established above in the seat of the divinePurusha, below in the ocean of the subconscient and in the Life,


antah. samudre hr.di antar ayus.i. The conscious mind is, then,the channel through which there is communication between theupper ocean and the lower, between superconscient and sub-conscient, the light divine and the original darkness of Nature.

Vayu is the Lord of Life. By the ancient Mystics life wasconsidered to be a great force pervading all material existenceand the condition of all its activities. It is this idea that wasformulated later on in the conception of the Prana, the uni-versal breath of life. All the vital and nervous activities of thehuman being fall within the definition of Prana, and belong tothe domain of Vayu. Yet this great deity has comparatively fewhymns to his share in the Rig Veda and even in those Suktas inwhich he is prominently invoked, does not usually figure alonebut in company with others and as if dependent on them. Heis especially coupled with Indra and it would almost seem as iffor the functionings demanded from him by the Vedic Rishis heneeded the aid of the superior deity. When there is question ofthe divine action of the Life-forces in man, Agni in the form ofthe Vedic Horse, Ashwa, Dadhikravan, takes usually the placeof Vayu.

If we consider the fundamental ideas of the Rishis, this posi-tion of Vayu becomes intelligible. The illumination of the lowerbeing by the higher, the mortal by the divine, was their principalconcept. Light and Force, Go and Ashwa, the Cow and theHorse, were the object of the sacrifice. Force was the condition,Light the liberating agency; and Indra and Surya were the chiefbringers of Light. Moreover the Force required was the divineWill taking possession of all the human energies and revealingitself in them; and of this Will, this force of conscious energytaking possession of the nervous vitality and revealing itself init, Agni more than Vayu and especially Agni Dadhikravan wasthe symbol. For it is Agni who is master of Tapas, the divineConsciousness formulating itself in universal energy, of whichthe Prana is only a representative in the lower being. Thereforein Vamadeva’s hymn, the fifty-eighth of the fourth Mandala, itis Indra and Surya and Agni who effect the great manifestationof the conscious divinity out of the subconscient. Vata or Vayu,

310 Selected Hymns

the nervous activity, is only a first condition of the emergentMind. And for man it is the meeting of Life with Mind and thesupport given by the former to the evolution of the latter which isthe important aspect of Vayu. Therefore we find Indra, Masterof Mind, and Vayu, Master of Life, coupled together and thelatter always somewhat dependent on the former; the Maruts,the thought-forces, although in their origin they seem to be asmuch powers of Vayu as of Indra, are more important to theRishis than Vayu himself and even in their dynamic aspect aremore closely associated with Agni Rudra than with the naturalchief of the legions of the Air.

The present hymn, the forty-eighth of the Mandala, is thelast of three in which Vamadeva invokes Indra and Vayu forthe drinking of the Soma-wine. They are called in conjointly asthe two lords of brilliant force, savasaspatı, as in another hymn,in a former Mandala, they are invoked as lords of thought,dhiyaspatı. Indra is the master of mental force, Vayu of nervousor vital force and their union is necessary for thought and foraction. They are invited to come in one common chariot anddrink together of the wine of the Ananda which brings withit the divinising energies. Vayu, it is said, has the right of thefirst draught; for it is the supporting vital forces that must firstbecome capable of the ecstasy of the divine action.

In the third hymn, in which the result of the sacrifice isdefined, Vayu is alone invoked, but even so his companionshipwith Indra is clearly indicated. He is to come in a chariot ofhappy brightness, like Usha in another hymn, to drink of the im-mortalising wine.1 The chariot symbolises movement of energyand it is a glad movement of already illuminated vital energiesthat is invoked in the form of Vayu. The divine utility of thisbrightly happy movement is indicated in the first three verses.

The god is to manifest — he is to bring into the light of theconscious activity sacrificial energies which are not yet mani-fested,2 are yet hidden in the darkness of the subconscient. In

1 Vayava candren. a rathena yahi sutasya pıtaye.2 Vihi hotra avıta.


the ritualistic interpretation the phrase may be translated, “Eatof offerings that have not been eaten” or, in another sense of theverb vı, it may be rendered “Arrive at sacrificial energies whichhave never been approached”; but all these renderings amount,symbolically, to the same psychological sense. Powers and ac-tivities that have not yet been called up out of the subconscient,have to be liberated from its secret cave by the combined actionof Indra and Vayu and devoted to the work.

For it is not towards an ordinary action of the nervousmentality that they are called. Vayu is to manifest these energiesas would “a revealer of the felicity, a doer of the Aryan work”,vipo na rayo aryah. . These words sufficiently indicate the natureof the energies that are to be evoked. It is possible, however,that the phrase may have a covert reference to Indra and thusindicate what is afterwards clearly expressed, the necessity thatVayu’s action should be governed by the illumined and aspiringforce of the more brilliant god. For it is Indra’s enlightenmentthat leads to the secret of beatitude being revealed and he isthe first labourer in the Work. To Indra, Agni and Surya amongthe gods is especially applied the term arya, which describeswith an untranslatable compactness those who rise to the nobleaspiration and who do the great labour as an offering in orderto arrive at the good and the bliss.

In the second verse the necessity of Indra’s guidance isaffirmed expressly. Vayu is to come putting away all denialsthat may be opposed to the manifestation of the unmani-fested, niryuvan. o asastıh. . The word asastıh. means literally“not-expressings” and describes the detention by obscuringpowers like Vritra of the light and power that are waiting tobe revealed, ready to be called out into expression through theinfluence of the gods and by the instrumentality of the Word.The Word is the power that expresses, sastram, gir, vacas. Butit has to be protected and given its right effect by the divinePowers. Vayu is to do this office; he has to expel all powers ofdenial, of obscuration, of non-manifestation. To do this workhe must arrive “with his steeds of the yoking and Indra forcharioteer”, niyutvan indrasarathih. . The steeds of Indra, of

312 Selected Hymns

Vayu, of Surya have each their appropriate name. Indra’s horsesare hari or babhru, red gold or tawny yellow; Surya’s harit,indicating a more deep, full and intense luminousness; Vayu’sare niyut, steeds of the yoking, for they represent those dynamicmovements which yoke the energy to its action. But althoughthey are the horses of Vayu, they have to be driven by Indra, themovements of the Master of nervous and vital energy guided bythe Master of mind.

The third verse3 would seem at first to bring in an uncon-nected idea; it speaks of a dark Heaven and Earth with all theirforms obeying or following in their labour the movements ofVayu in his Indra-driven car. They are not mentioned by namebut described as the two black or dark holders of substanceor holders of wealth, vasudhitı; but the latter word sufficientlyindicates earth and by implication of the dual form Heaven also,its companion. We must note that it is not Heaven the father andEarth the mother that are indicated, but the two sisters, Rodasi,feminine forms of heaven and earth, who symbolise the generalenergies of the mental and physical consciousness. It is theirdark states — the obscured consciousness between its two limitsof the mental and the physical, — which by the happy movementof the nervous dynamism begin to labour in accordance with themovement or under the control of Vayu and to yield up theirhidden forms; for all forms are concealed in them and they mustbe compelled to reveal them. Thus we discover that this versecompletes the sense of the two that precede. For always whenthe Veda is properly understood, its verses are seen to unrollthe thought with a profound logical coherence and pregnantsuccession.

The two remaining riks indicate the result produced by thisaction of Heaven and Earth and by their yielding up of hiddenforms and unmanifested energies on the movement of Vayu ashis car gallops towards the Ananda. First of all his horses are toattain their normally complete general number. “Let the ninety-

3 Anu kr.s.n. e vasudhitı yemate visvapesasa.


nine be yoked and bear thee, those that are yoked by the mind.”4

The constantly recurring numbers ninety-nine, a hundred anda thousand have a symbolic significance in the Veda which itis very difficult to disengage with any precision. The secret isperhaps to be found in the multiplication of the mystic numberseven by itself and its double repetition with a unit added beforeand at the end, making altogether 1+49+49+1=100. Seven isthe number of essential principles in manifested Nature, theseven forms of divine consciousness at play in the world. Each,formulated severally, contains the other six in itself; thus the fullnumber is forty-nine, and to this is added the unit above outof which all develops, giving us altogether a scale of fifty andforming the complete gamut of active consciousness. But thereis also its duplication by an ascending and descending series, thedescent of the gods, the ascent of man. This gives us ninety-nine,the number variously applied in the Veda to horses, cities, rivers,in each case with a separate but kindred symbolism. If we addan obscure unit below into which all descends to the luminousunit above towards which all ascends we have the full scale ofone hundred.

It is therefore a complex energy of consciousness which isto be the result of Vayu’s movement; it is the emergence of thefullest movement of the mental activity now only latent andpotential in man, — the ninety and nine steeds that are yoked bythe mind. And in the next verse the culminating unit is added.We have a hundred horses, and because the action is now thatof complete luminous mentality, these steeds, though they stillcarry Vayu and Indra, are no longer merely niyut, but hari, thecolour of Indra’s brilliant bays.5 “Yoke, O Vayu, a hundred ofthe brilliant ones, that are to be increased.”

But why to be increased? Because a hundred represents thegeneral fullness of the variously combined movements, but nottheir utter complexity. Each of the hundred can be multiplied byten; all can be increased in their own kind: for that is the nature

4 Vahantu tva manoyujo yuktaso navatir nava.5 Vayo satam harın. am yuvasva pos.yan. am.

314 Selected Hymns

of the increase indicated by the word pos.yan. am. Therefore, saysthe Rishi, either come with the general fullness of the hundred tobe afterwards nourished into their full complexity of a hundredtens or, if thou wilt, come at once with thy thousand and let thymovement arrive in the utter mass of its entire potential energy.6

It is the completely varied all-ensphering, all-energising mentalillumination with its full perfection of being, power, bliss, knowl-edge, mentality, vital force, physical activity that he desires. For,this attained, the subconscient is compelled to yield up all itshidden possibilities at the will of the perfected mind for the richand abundant movement of the perfected life.

6 Uta va te sahasrin.o ratha a yatu pajasa.

IX

Brihaspati, Power of the Soul

Rig Veda IV.50

y�t�tMB shsA Ev ?mo atAn� b� h�pEtE��qD�To rv�Z t� $As !qyo dF2yAnA� p� ro Ev A dEDr� md� Ejh� vm� � ��

l. He who established in his might the extremities of the earth,Brihaspati, in the triple world of our fulfilment, by his cry,on him the pristine sages meditated and, illumined, set himin their front with his tongue of ecstasy.

D� n�ty� s� k�t� mdto b� h�pt� aEB y� n�tt5� p� qt� s� mdNDm� v: b� h�pt� r0tAd�y yoEnm� � ��

2. They, O Brihaspati, vibrating with the impulse of theirmovement, rejoicing in perfected consciousness wove forus abundant, rapid, invincible, wide, the world from whichthis being was born. That do thou protect, O Brihaspati.

b� h�pt� yA prmA prAvdt aA t !t�p� fo En q�d� � t� �y� KAtA avtA aEd� d� �DA m2v� �cot�yEBto Evr@fm� � ��

3. O Brihaspati, that which is the highest supreme of existence,thither from this world they attain and take their seat whotouch the Truth. For thee are dug the wells of honey whichdrain this hill and their sweetnesses stream out on every sideand break into overflowing.

b� h�pEt� Tm� jAymAno mho ?yoEtq� prm� 4yomn� sJA�y�t� EvjAto rv�Z Ev sJrE�mrDmt� tmA�Es � ��

316 Selected Hymns

4. Brihaspati first in his birth from the vast light, in the highestheavenly space, with his seven fronts, with his seven rays,with his many births, drives utterly away the darknesses thatencompass us with his cry.

s s� �V� BA s !/vtA gZ�n vl� zroj PElg� rv�Z b� h�pEtzE5yA h4ys� d� kEn+dd� vAvftFzdAjt� � "�

5. He with his cohort of the rhythm that affirms, of the chantthat illumines has broken Vala into pieces with his cry.Brihaspati drives upward the Bright Ones who speed ourofferings; he shouts aloud as he leads them, lowing theyreply.

evA Ep�� Ev�vd�vAy v� �Z� y��Ev'D�m nmsA hEvEB'� b� h�pt� s� jA vFrvto vy� �yAm ptyo ryFZAm� � (�

6. Thus to the Father, the universal Godhead, the Bull of theherds, may we dispose our sacrifices and submission andoblations; O Brihaspati, full of energy and rich in offspringmay we become masters of the felicities.

s id� rAjA EtjyAEn Ev�vA f� �m�Z t�TAvEB vFy�'Z b� h�pEt� y� s� B� t� EbBEt' vSg� yEt vdt� p� v'BAjm� � *�

7. Verily is he King and conquers by his energy, by his heroicforce all that is in the worlds that confront him, who bearsBrihaspati in him well-contained and has the exultant danceand adores and gives him the first fruits of his enjoyment.

s it� 0�Et s� EDt aokEs �v� t�mA i1A Epvt� Ev�vdAnFm� t�m� Evf� �vym�vA nmt� yE�mn� b�LA rAjEn p� v' eEt � ,�

8. Yea, he dwells firmly seated in his proper home and for himIla at all times grows in richness. To him all creatures ofthemselves submit, the King, he in whom the Soul-Powergoes in front.

Brihaspati, Power of the Soul 317

a tFto jyEt s� DnAEn EtjyAy� t yA sjyA av�yv� yo vErv� k� ZoEt b�LZ� rAjA tmvEt d�vA� � -�

9. None can assail him, he conquers utterly all the riches ofthe worlds which confront him and the world in which hedwells; he who for the Soul-Power that seeks its manifesta-tion creates in himself that highest good, is cherished by thegods.

id� �c som� Epbt� b� h�pt��E�mn� y�� mdsAnA v� q vs� aA vA� EvfE�vdv� �vAB� vo��m� rEy� sv'vFr� En yQCtm� � �.�

10. Thou, O Brihaspati, and Indra, drink the Soma-wine rejoic-ing in this sacrifice, lavishing substance. Let the powers ofits delight enter into you and take perfect form, control inus a felicity full of every energy.

b� h�pt id� vD't� n� scA sA vA� s� mEtB�'�v�m� aEv�V� EDyo Ejg� t� p� rDFj'j�tmyo' vn� qAmrAtF� � ��

11. O Brihaspati, O Indra, increase in us together and may thatyour perfection of mind be created in us; foster the thoughts,bring out the mind’s multiple powers; destroy all povertiesthat they bring who seek to conquer the Aryan.

COMMENTARY

Brihaspati, Brahmanaspati, Brahma are the three names of thegod to whom the Rishi Vamadeva addresses this mystic hymnof praise. In the later Puranic theogonies Brihaspati and Brahmahave long become separate deities. Brahma is the Creator, oneof the Three who form the great Puranic Trinity; Brihaspati isa figure of no great importance, spiritual teacher of the gods,and incidentally guardian of the planet Jupiter; Brahmanaspati,the middle term which once linked the two, has disappeared.To restore the physiognomy of the Vedic deity we have to re-unite what has been disjoined and correct the values of the two

318 Selected Hymns

separated terms in the light of the original Vedic conceptions.Brahman in the Veda signifies ordinarily the Vedic Word

or mantra in its profoundest aspect as the expression of theintuition arising out of the depths of the soul or being. It is avoice of the rhythm which has created the worlds and createsperpetually. All world is expression or manifestation, creationby the Word. Conscious Being luminously manifesting its con-tents in itself, of itself, tmana, is the superconscient; holding itscontents obscurely in itself it is the subconscient. The higher,the self-luminous descends into the obscure, into the night,into darkness concealed in darkness, tamas tamasa gud.ham,where all is hidden in formless being owing to fragmentationof consciousness, tucchyenabhvapihitam. It arises again out ofthe Night by the Word to reconstitute in the conscient its vastunity, tan mahinajayataikam. This vast Being, this all-containingand all-formulating consciousness is Brahman. It is the Soul thatemerges out of the subconscient in Man and rises towards thesuperconscient. And the word of creative Power welling upwardout of the soul is also brahman.

The Divine, the Deva, manifests itself as conscious Powerof the soul, creates the worlds by the Word out of the waters ofthe subconscient, apraketam salilam sarvam, — the inconscientocean that was this all, as it is plainly termed in the great Hymnof Creation. This power of the Deva is Brahma, the stress in thename falling more upon the conscious soul-power than uponthe Word which expresses it. The manifestation of the differentworld-planes in the conscient human being culminates in themanifestation of the superconscient, the Truth and the Bliss, andthis is the office of the supreme Word or Veda. Of this supremeword Brihaspati is the master, the stress in this name falling uponthe potency of the Word rather than upon the thought of thegeneral soul-power which is behind it. Brihaspati gives the Wordof knowledge, the rhythm of expression of the superconscient,to the gods and especially to Indra, the lord of Mind, when theywork in man as “Aryan” powers for the great consummation. Itis easy to see how these conceptions came to be specialised in thebroader, but less subtle and profound Puranic symbolism into


Brahma, the Creator, and Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods. Inthe name, Brahmanaspati, the two varying stresses are unifiedand equalised. It is the link-name between the general and thespecial aspects of the same deity.

Brihaspati is he who has established firmly the limits anddefinitions of the Earth, that is to say of the material conscious-ness. The existence out of which all formations are made is anobscure, fluid and indeterminate movement, — salilam, Water.The first necessity is to create a sufficiently stable formation outof this flux and running so as to form a basis for the life of theconscient. This Brihaspati does in the formation of the physicalconsciousness and its world, sahasa, by force, by a sort of mightyconstraint upon the resistance of the subconscient. This greatcreation he effects by establishing the triple principle of mind,life and body, always present together and involved in each otheror evolved out of each other in the world of the cosmic labourand fulfilment. The three together form the triple seat of Agniand there he works out the gradual work of accomplishment orperfection which is the object of the sacrifice. Brihaspati formsby sound, by his cry, raven. a, for the Word is the cry of the soulas it awakens to ever-new perceptions and formations. “He whoestablished firmly by force the ends of the earth, Brihaspati inthe triple seat of the fulfilment, by his cry.”1

On him, it is said, the ancient or pristine Rishis meditated;meditating, they became illumined in mind; illumined, they sethim in front as the god of the ecstatic tongue, mandrajihvam,the tongue that takes joy of the intoxicating wine of Soma,mada, madhu, of that which is the wave of sweetness, madhu-man urmih. , hidden in the conscient existence and out of itprogressively delivered.2 But of whom is there question? Theseven divine Rishis, r.s.ayo divyah. , who fulfilling consciousnessin each of its seven principles and harmonising them togethersuperintend the evolution of the world, or the human fathers,pitaro manus.yah. , who first discovered the higher knowledge

1 Yas tastambha sahasa vi jmo antan, br.haspatis tris.adhastho raven.a.2 Tam pratnasa rs.ayo dıdhyanah. , puro vipra dadhire mandrajihvam.

320 Selected Hymns

and formulated for man the infinity of the Truth-consciousness?Either may be intended, but the reference seems to be rather tothe conquest of the Truth by the human fathers, the Ancients.The word dıdhyana in the Veda means both shining, becomingluminous, and thinking, meditating, fixing in the thought. It isconstantly being used with the peculiar Vedic figure of a doubleor complex sense. In the first sense it must be connected withviprah. , and the suggestion is that the Rishis became more andmore luminous in thought by the triumphant force of Brihaspatiuntil they grew into Illuminates, viprah. . In the second it is con-nected with dadhire and suggests that the Rishis, meditating onthe intuitions that rise up from the soul with the cry of Brihaspatiin the sacred and enlightening Word, holding them firmly in thethought, became illuminated in mind, open to the full inflow ofthe superconscient. They were thus able to bring into the frontof the conscious being that activity of the soul-thoughts whichworks usually in the background, veiled, and to make it theleading activity of their nature. As a result Brihaspati in thembecame able to taste for them the bliss of existence, the wine ofImmortality, the supreme Ananda. The formation of the definitephysical consciousness is the first step, this awakening to theAnanda by the bringing forward in mind of the intuitive soul asthe leader of our conscious activities is the consummation or, atleast, the condition of the consummation.

The result is the formation of the Truth-consciousness inman. The ancient Rishis attained to the most rapid vibration ofthe movement; the most full and swift streaming of the flux ofconsciousness which constitutes our active existence, no longerobscure as in the subconscient, but full of the joy of perfectedconsciousness, — not apraketam like the Ocean described in theHymn of Creation, but supraketam. Thus they are described,dhunetayah. supraketam madantah. . With this attainment of thefull rapidity of the activities of consciousness unified with itsfull light and bliss in the human mentality they have wovenfor the race by the web of these rapid, luminous and joyousperceptions the Truth-consciousness, Ritam Brihat, which is thewomb or birth-place of this conscient being. For it is out of the


superconscient that existence descends into the subconscient andcarries with it that which emerges here as the individual humanbeing, the conscious soul. The nature of this Truth-consciousnessis in itself this that it is abundant in its outflowings, pr.s.antam,or, it may be, many-coloured in the variety of its harmonisedqualities; it is rapid in its motion, sr.pram; by that luminousrapidity it triumphs over all that seeks to quell or break it, itis adabdham; above all it is wide, vast, infinite, urvam. In allthese respects it is the opposite of the first limited movementwhich emerges out of the subconscient; for that is stinted andgrey, slow and hampered, easily overcome and broken by theopposition of hostile powers, scanty and bounded in its scope.3

But this Truth-consciousness manifested in man is capable ofbeing again veiled from him by the insurgence of the powersthat deny, the Vritras, Vala. The Rishi therefore prays to Brihas-pati to guard it against that obscuration by the fullness of hissoul-force.

The Truth-consciousness is the foundation of the supercon-scient, the nature of which is the Bliss. It is the supreme of thesupraconscient, parama paravat, from which the being has de-scended, the parama parardha of the Upanishads, the existenceof Sachchidananda. It is to that highest existence that those ariseout of this physical consciousness, atah. , who like the ancientRishis enter into contact with the Truth-consciousness.4 Theymake it their seat and home, ks.aya, okas. For in the hill of thephysical being there are dug for the soul those abounding wellsof sweetness which draw out of its hard rigidity the concealedAnanda; at the touch of the Truth the rivers of honey, the quickpourings of the wine of Immortality trickle and stream and breakout into a flood of abundance over the whole extent of thehuman consciousness.5

Thus Brihaspati, becoming manifest first of the gods out of

3 Dhunetayah. supraketam madanto, br.haspate abhi ye nas tatasre; pr.s.antam sr.pramadabdham urvam, br.haspate raks.atad asya yonim.4 Br.haspate ya parama paravad, ata a te r.taspr.so ni s.eduh. .5 Tubhyam khata avata adridugdha, madhvah. scotanti abhito virapsam.

322 Selected Hymns

the vastness of that Light of the Truth-consciousness, in thathighest heavenly space of the supreme superconscient, mahojyotis.ah. parame vyoman, presents himself in the full sevenfoldaspect of our conscious being, multiply born in all the forms ofthe interplay of its seven principles ranging from the materialto the purest spiritual, luminous with their sevenfold ray whichlights all our surfaces and all our profundities, and with histriumphant cry dispels and scatters all powers of the Night, allencroachments of the Inconscient, all possible darknesses.6

It is by the powers of the Word, by the rhythmic army ofthe soul-forces that Brihaspati brings all into expression anddispelling all the darknesses that encompass us makes an end ofthe Night. These are the “Brahma”s of the Veda, charged withthe word, the brahman, the mantra; it is they in the sacrificewho raise heavenward the divine Rik, the Stubh or Stoma. R. k,connected with the word arka which means light or illumination,is the Word considered as a power of realisation in the illumi-nating consciousness; stubh is the Word considered as a powerwhich affirms and confirms in the settled rhythm of things. Thatwhich has to be expressed is realised in consciousness, affirmed,finally confirmed by the power of the Word. The “Brahma”s orBrahmana forces are the priests of the Word, the creators by thedivine rhythm. It is by their cry that Brihaspati breaks Vala intofragments.

As Vritra is the enemy, the Dasyu, who holds back theflow of the sevenfold waters of conscient existence, — Vritra,the personification of the Inconscient, so Vala is the enemy, theDasyu, who holds back in his hole, his cave, bilam, guha, theherds of the Light; he is the personification of the subconscient.Vala is not himself dark or inconscient, but a cause of darkness.Rather his substance is of the light, valam gomantam, valamgovapus.am, but he holds the light in himself and denies itsconscious manifestation. He has to be broken into fragmentsin order that the hidden lustres may be liberated. Their escape

6 Br.haspatih. prathamam jayamano, maho jyotis.ah. parame vyoman; saptasyas tuvijatoraven.a, vi saptarasmir adhamat tamamsi.


is expressed by the emergence of the Bright Ones, the herdsof the Dawn, from the cavern below in the physical hill andtheir driving upward by Brihaspati to the heights of our beingwhither with them and by them we climb. He calls to them withthe voice of the superconscient knowledge; they follow him withthe response of the conscious intuition. They give in their coursethe impulsion to the activities which form the material of thesacrifice and constitute the offerings given to the gods and thesealso are carried upward till they reach the same divine goal.7

This self-expressive Soul, Brihaspati, is the Purusha, theFather of all things; it is the universal Divinity; it is the Bullof the herds, the Master and fertilizer of all these luminousenergies evolved or involved, active in the day or obscurelyworking in the night of things, which constitute the becomingor world-existence, bhuvanam. To the Purusha under the nameof Brihaspati the Rishi would have us dispose in the order ofa sacrifice all the materials of our being by sacrificial action inwhich they are given up to the All-Soul as acceptable oblationsoffered with adoration and surrender. By the sacrifice we shallbecome through the grace of this godhead full of heroic energyfor the battle of life, rich in the offspring of the soul, mastersof the felicities which are attained by divine enlightenment andright action.8

For the soul’s energy and overcoming force are perfectedin the human being who bears in himself and is able to bearfirmly this conscious Soul-power brought forward as the leadingagency in the nature, who arrives by it at a rapid and joyousmovement of the inner activities as did the pristine sages, com-passes that harmonious bound and gallop of the steed of Lifewithin and adores always this godhead giving it the first fruitsof all results and enjoyments. By that energy he throws himselfupon and masters all that comes to him in the births, the worlds,the planes of consciousness that open upon his perception in the

7 Sa sus.t.ubha sa r.kvata gan. ena, valam ruroja phaligam raven.a; br.haspatir usriyahavyasudah. , kanikradad vavasatır udajat.8 Eva pitre visvadevaya vr.s.n. e, yajnair vidhema namasa havirbhih. ; br.haspate supraja

vıravanto, vayam syama patayo rayın. am.

324 Selected Hymns

progress of the being. He becomes the king, the samrat., ruler ofhis world-environment.9

For such a soul attains to a firmly settled existence in itsown proper home, the Truth-consciousness, the infinite totality,and for it at all times Ila, the highest Word, premier energy ofthe Truth-consciousness, she who is the direct revealing visionin knowledge and becomes in that knowledge the spontaneousself-attainment of the Truth of things in action, result and expe-rience, — Ila grows perpetually in body and richness. To him allcreatures of themselves incline, they submit to the Truth in himbecause it is one with the Truth in themselves. For the consciousSoul-Power that is the universal creator and realiser, leads inall his activities. It gives him the guidance of the Truth in hisrelations with all creatures and therefore he acts upon themwith an entire and spontaneous mastery. This is the ideal stateof man that the soul-force should lead him, Brihaspati, Brahma,the spiritual light and counsellor, and he realising himself asIndra, the royal divinity of action, should govern himself andall his environment in the right of their common Truth. Brahmarajani purva eti.10

For this Brahma, this creative Soul seeks to manifest andincrease himself in the royalty of the human nature and he whoattains to that royalty of light and power and creates in him-self for Brahma that highest human good, finds himself alwayscherished, fostered, increased by all the divine cosmic powerswho work for the supreme consummation. He wins all thosepossessions of the soul which are necessary for the royalty ofthe spirit, those that belong to his own plane of consciousness,and those that present themselves to him from other planesof consciousness. Nothing can assail or affect his triumphantprogress.11

9 Sa id raja pratijanyani visva, sus.men. a tasthav abhi vıryen.a; br.haspatim yah. subhr.tambibharti, valguyati vandate purvabhajam.10 Sa it ks.eti sudhita okasi sve, tasma il.a pinvate visvadanım; tasmai visah. svayam evanamante, yasmin brahma rajani purva eti.11 Apratıto jayati sam dhanani, pratijanyani uta ya sajanya; avasyave yo varivah. kr.n.oti,brahman.e raja tam avanti devah. .


Indra and Brihaspati are thus the two divine powers whosefullness in us and conscious possession of the Truth are the con-ditions of our perfection. Vamadeva calls on them to drink in thisgreat sacrifice the wine of immortal Ananda, rejoicing in the in-toxication of its ecstasies, pouring out abundantly the substanceand riches of the spirit. Those outpourings of the superconscientbeatitude must enter into the soul-force and there take beingperfectly. Thus a felicity will be formed, a governed harmony,replete with all the energies and capacities of the perfected naturewhich is master of itself and its world.12

So let Brihaspati and Indra increase in us and that state ofright mentality which together they build will be manifested; forthat is the first condition. Let them foster the growing thoughtsand bring into expression those energies of the mental beingwhich by an enriched and multiple thought become capableof the illumination and rapidity of the Truth-consciousness.The powers that attack the Aryan fighter, would create in himpoverties of mind and poverties of the emotive nature, all infe-licities. Soul force and mental force increasing together, destroyall such poverty and insufficiency. Together they bring man tohis crowning and his perfect kinghood.13

12 Indras ca somam pibatam br.haspate, asmin yajne mandasana vr.s.an.vasu; a vamvisantu indavah. svabhuvo, asme rayim sarvavıram ni yacchatam.13 Br.haspate indra vardhatam. nah. , saca sa vam sumatir bhutu asme; avis.t.am dhiyojigr.tam purandhır, jajastam aryo vanus.am aratıh. .

X

The Ashwins, Lords of Bliss

Rig Veda IV.45

eq �y BAn� zEdyEt' y� ?yt� rT� pEr?mA Edvo a�y sAnEv p� 0Aso aE�mEmT� nA aED �yo d� Et�t� rFyo mD� no Ev r@ft� � ��

1. Lo, that Light is rising up and the all-pervading car is beingyoked on the high level of this Heaven; there are placedsatisfying delights in their triple pairs and the fourth skin ofhoney overflows.

ud� vA� p� 0Aso mD� mt Irt� rTA a�vAs uqso 4y� E�Vq� apoZ�'vt�tm aA prFv� t� �vZ' f� +� tvt aA rj� � ��

2. Full of honey upward rise the delights; upward horses andcars in the wide-shinings of the Dawn and they roll aside theveil of darkness that encompassed on every side and theyextend the lower world into a shining form like that of theluminous heaven.

m2v� Epbt� mD� p�EBrAsEBzt E y� mD� n� y� RATA� rTm� aA vt'En� mD� nA EjvT�pTo d� Et� vh�T� mD� mtmE�vnA � ��

3. Drink of the honey with your honey-drinking mouths, forthe honey yoke your car beloved. With the honey you glad-den the movement and its paths; full of honey, O Ashwins,is the skin that you bear.

h�sAso y� vA� mD� mto aE5Do Ehr ypZA' uh� v uqb�'D� ud � to mEdno mEdEn�p� fo m2vo n m0� svnAEn gQCT� � ��

The Ashwins, Lords of Bliss 327

4. Full of the honey are the swans that bear you, golden-winged, waking with the Dawn, and they come not to hurt;they rain forth the waters, they are full of rapture and touchthat which holds the Rapture. Like bees to pourings of honeyyou come to the Soma-offerings.

�v2vrAso mD� mto a�ny u5A jrt� Et v�torE�vnA yE�/th�t�trEZEv'c0Z� som� s� qAv mD� mtmEd� EB� � "�

5. Full of the honey the fires lead well the sacrifice and theywoo your brightness, O Ashwins, day by day, when onewith purified hands, with a perfect vision, with power to gothrough to the goal has pressed out with the pressing-stonesthe honeyed Soma-wine.

aAk�EnpAso ahEBd'Ev2vt� �vZ' f� +� tvt aA rj� s� rE�cd�vAn� y� y� jAn Iyt� Ev�vA& an� �vDyA c�tT�pT� � (�

6. Drinking the wine near them, the fires ride and run andextend the lower world into a shining form like that ofthe luminous heaven. The Sun too goes yoking his steeds;by force of Nature’s self-arranging you move consciouslyalong all paths.1

vAmvocmE�vnA EDy�DA rT� �v�vo ajro yo aE�t y�n s%� pEr rjA�Es yATo hEv�mt� trEZ� BojmQC � *�

7. I have declared, O Ashwins, holding the Thought in me,your car that is undecaying and drawn by perfect steeds,— your car by which you move at once over all the worldstowards the enjoyment rich in offerings that makes throughto the goal.

1 Or, you take knowledge of all the paths in their order.

328 Selected Hymns

COMMENTARY

The hymns of the Rig Veda addressed to the two shining Twins,like those addressed to the Ribhus, are full of symbolic expres-sions and unintelligible without a firm clue to their symbolism.The three leading features of these hymns to the Ashwins are thepraise of their chariot, their horses and their rapid all-pervadingmovement; their seeking of honey and their joy in the honey,madhu, and the satisfying delights that they carry in their car;and their close association with the Sun, with Surya the daughterof the Sun and with the Dawn.

The Ashwins like the other gods descend from the Truth-consciousness, the Ritam; they are born or manifested fromHeaven, from Dyaus, the pure Mind; their movement pervadesall the worlds, — the effect of their action ranges from the bodythrough the vital being and the thought to the superconscientTruth. It commences indeed from the ocean, from the vagueof the being as it emerges out of the subconscient and theyconduct the soul over the flood of these waters and prevent itsfoundering on its voyage. They are therefore Nasatya, lords ofthe movement, leaders of the journey or voyage.

They help man with the Truth which comes to them espe-cially by association with the Dawn, with Surya, lord of theTruth, and with Surya, his daughter, but they help him morecharacteristically with the delight of being. They are lords ofbliss, subhaspatı; their car or movement is loaded with the satis-factions of the delight of being in all its planes; they bear the skinfull of the overflowing honey; they seek the honey, the sweetness,and fill all things with it. They are therefore effective powers ofthe Ananda which proceeds out of the Truth-consciousness andwhich manifesting itself variously in all the three worlds main-tains man in his journey. Hence their action is in all the worlds.They are especially riders or drivers of the Horse, Ashwins,as their name indicates, — they use the vitality of the humanbeing as the motive-force of the journey: but also they work inthe thought and lead it to the Truth. They give health, beauty,wholeness to the body; they are the divine physicians. Of all


the gods they are the most ready to come to man and to createfor him ease and joy, agamis.t.ha, subhaspatı. For this is theirpeculiar and perfect function. They are essentially lords of weal,of bliss, subhaspatı.

This character of the Ashwins is brought out with a con-tinual emphasis by Vamadeva in the present hymn. In almostevery verse occurs with a constant iteration the words madhu,madhuman, honey, honied. It is a hymn to the sweetness ofexistence; it is a chant of the delight of being.

The great Light of lights, the Sun of Truth, the illuminationof the Truth-consciousness is rising up out of the movement oflife to create the illumined Mind, Swar, which completes theevolution of the lower triple world. Es.a sya bhanur udiyarti. Bythis rising of the Sun in man, the full movement of the Ashwinsbecomes possible; for by the Truth comes the realised Delight,the heavenly beatitude. Therefore, the chariot of the Ashwinsis being yoked upon the height of this Dyaus, the high level orplane of the resplendent mind. That chariot is all-pervading; itsmotion goes everywhere; its speed runs freely on all planes ofour consciousness. Yujyate rathah. parijma divo asya sanavi.

The full all-pervading movement of the Ashwins brings withit the fullness of all the possible satisfactions of the delight ofbeing. This is expressed symbolically in the language of theVeda by saying that in their car are found the satisfactions,pr.ks.asah. , in three pairs, pr.ks.asa asmin mithuna adhi trayah. .The word pr.ks.a is rendered food in the ritual interpretationlike the kindred word prayas. The root means pleasure, fullness,satisfaction, and may have the material sense of a “delicacy” orsatisfying food and the psychological sense of a delight, pleasureor satisfaction. The satisfactions or delicacies which are carriedin the car of the Ashwins are, then, in three pairs; or the phrasemay simply mean, they are three but closely associated together.In any case, the reference is to the three kinds of satisfaction orpleasure which correspond to the three movements or worldsof our progressive consciousness, — satisfactions of the body,satisfactions of the vitality, satisfactions of the mind. If they arein three pairs, then we must understand that on each plane there

330 Selected Hymns

is a double action of the delight corresponding to the doubleand united twinhood of the Ashwins. It is difficult in the Vedaitself to distinguish between these brilliant and happy Twins orto discover what each severally represents. We have no suchindication as is given us in the case of the three Ribhus. Butperhaps the Greek names of these two Dioskouroi, Divo napata,sons of Heaven, contain a clue. Kastor, the name of the elder,seems to be Kashtri, the Shining One; Poludeukes2 may possiblybe Purudansas, a name which occurs in the Veda as an epithetof the Ashwins, the Manifold in activity. If so, the twin birthof the Ashwins recalls the constant Vedic dualism of Power andLight, Knowledge and Will, Consciousness and Energy, Go andAshwa. In all the satisfactions brought to us by the Ashwinsthese two elements are inseparably united; where the form isthat of the Light or Consciousness, there Power and Energy arecontained; where the form is that of the Power or Energy, thereLight and Consciousness are contained.

But these three forms of satisfaction are not all that theirchariot holds for us; there is something else, a fourth, a skin fullof honey and out of this skin the honey breaks and overflows onevery side. Dr.tis turıyo madhuno vi rapsate. Mind, life and body,these are three; turıya, the fourth plane of our consciousness, isthe superconscient, the Truth-consciousness. The Ashwins bringwith them a skin, dr.ti, literally a thing cut or torn, a partialformation out of the Truth-consciousness to contain the honeyof the superconscient Beatitude; but it cannot contain it; thatunconquerably abundant and infinite sweetness breaks out andoverflows everywhere drenching with delight the whole of ourexistence.

With that honey the three pairs of satisfactions, mental,vital, bodily are impregnated by this all-pervasive overflowingplenty and they become full of its sweetness, madhumantah. .And so becoming, at once they begin to move upward. Touched

2 The k of Poludeukes points to an original s; the name would then be Purudamsas;but such fluctuations between the various sibilants were common enough in the earlyfluid state of the Aryan tongues.


by the divine delight all our satisfactions in this lower worldsoar upward irresistibly attracted towards the superconscient,towards the Truth, towards the Beatitude. And with them, —for, secretly or openly, consciously or subconsciously it is thedelight of being that is the leader of our activities, — all thechariots and horses of these gods take the same soaring upwardmovement. All the various movements of our being, all the formsof Force that give them their impulsion, all follow the ascendinglight of Truth towards its home. Ud vam pr.ks.aso madhumantaırate, ratha asvasa us.aso vyus.t.is.u.

“In the wide-shinings of the Dawn” they rise; for Dawn isthe illumination of the Truth rising upon the mentality to bringthe day of full consciousness into the darkness or half-lit night ofour being. She comes as Dakshina, the pure intuitive discernmenton which Agni the God-force in us feeds when he aspires towardsthe Truth or as Sarama, the discovering intuition, who penetratesinto the cave of the subconscient where the niggard lords ofsense-action have hidden the radiant herds of the Sun and givesinformation to Indra. Then comes the lord of luminous Mindand breaks open the cave and drives upward the herds, udajat,upwards towards the vast Truth-consciousness, the own homeof the gods. Our conscious existence is a hill (adri) with manysuccessive levels and elevations, sanuni; the cave of the subcon-scient is below; we climb upwards towards the godhead of theTruth and Bliss where are the seats of Immortality, yatramr.tasaasate.3

By this upward movement of the chariot of the Ashwins withits burden of uplifted and transformed satisfactions the veil ofNight that encompasses the worlds of being in us is rolled away.All these worlds, mind, life, body, are opened to the rays ofthe Sun of Truth. This lower world in us, rajas, is extendedand shaped by this ascending movement of all its powers andsatisfactions into the very brightness of the luminous intuitivemind, Swar, which receives directly the higher Light. The mind,the act, the vital, emotional, substantial existence, all becomes

3 R.V. IX.15.2.

332 Selected Hymns

full of the glory and the intuition, the power and the light of thedivine Sun, — tat savitur varen. yam bhargo devasya.4 The lowermental existence is transformed into an image and reflectionof the higher Divine. Aporn. uvantas tama a parıvr.tam, svar n. asukram tanvanta a rajah. .

This verse closes the general description of the perfect andfinal movement of the Ashwins. In the third the Rishi Vamadevaturns to his own ascension, his own offering of the Soma, hisvoyage and sacrifice; he claims for it their beatific and glorifyingaction. The mouths of the Ashwins are made to drink of thesweetness; in his sacrifice, then, let them drink of it. Madhvah.pibatam madhupebhir asabhih. . Let them yoke their chariot forthe honey, their chariot beloved of men; uta priyam madhuneyunjatham ratham. For man’s movement, his progressive activ-ity, is made by them glad in all its paths with that very honeyand sweetness of the Ananda. A vartanim madhuna jinvathaspathah. . For they bear the skin full and overflowing with itshoney. Dr.tim vahethe madhumantam asvina. By the action ofthe Ashwins man’s progress towards the beatitude becomes itselfbeatific; all his travail and struggle and labour grows full of adivine delight. As it is said in the Veda that by Truth is theprogress towards the Truth, that is to say by the growing lawof the Truth in the mental and physical consciousness we arrivefinally beyond mind and body to the superconscient Truth, sohere it is indicated that by Ananda is the progress towards theAnanda, — by a divine delight growing in all our members, inall our activities we arrive at the superconscious beatitude.

In the upward movement the horses that draw the chariotof the Ashwins change into birds, into swans, hamsasah. . TheBird in the Veda is the symbol, very frequently, of the soulliberated and upsoaring, at other times of energies so liberatedand upsoaring, winging upwards towards the heights of ourbeing, winging widely with a free flight, no longer involved inthe ordinary limited movement or labouring gallop of the Life-energy, the Horse, Ashwa. Such are the energies that draw the

4 The great phrase of the Gayatri, R.V. III.62.10.


free car of the Lords of Delight, when there dawns on us theSun of the Truth. These winged movements are full of the honeyshowered from the overflowing skin, madhumantah. . They areunassailable, asridhah. , they come to no hurt in their flight; or,the sense may be, they make no false or hurtful movement. Andthey are golden-winged, hiran. yaparn. ah. . Gold is the symboliccolour of the light of Surya. The wings of these energies arethe full, satisfied, attaining movement, parn. a, of his luminousknowledge. For these are the birds that awake with the Dawn;these are the winged energies that come forth from their nestswhen the feet of the daughter of Heaven press the levels of ourhuman mentality, divo asya sanavi. Such are the swans that bearthe swift-riding Twins. Hamsaso ye vam madhumanto asridho,hiran. yaparn. a uhuva us.arbudhah. .

Full of the honey these winged energies shower on us as theyrise the abundance of the waters of heaven, the full outpouringof the high mental consciousness; they are instinct with ecstasy,with rapture, with the intoxication of the immortal wine; andthey touch, they come into conscious contact with that supercon-scient being which is eternally in possession of the ecstasy, rap-turous for ever with its divine intoxication. Udapruto mandinomandinispr.sah. . Drawn by them the Lords of delight come to theRishi’s Soma-offerings like bees to tricklings of honey; madh-vo na maks.ah. savanani gacchathah. . Makers themselves of thesweetness, they like the bees seek whatever sweetness can servethem as their material for more delight.

In the sacrifice the same movement of general illuminationalready described as the result of the ascending flight of theAshwins is now described as being effected by the aid of the firesof Agni. For the flames of the Will, the divine Force burning upin the soul, are also drenched with the overflowing sweetnessand therefore they perform perfectly from day to day their greatoffice of leading the sacrifice5 progressively to its goal. For that

5 Adhvara, the word for sacrifice, is really an adjective and the full phrase is adhvarayajna, sacrificial action travelling on the path, the sacrifice that is of the nature of aprogression or journey. Agni, the Will, is the leader of the sacrifice.

334 Selected Hymns

progress they woo with their flaming tongues the daily visitationof the brilliant Ashwins who are bright with the light of theintuitive illuminations and uphold them with their thought offlashing energy.6 Svadhvaraso madhumanta agnaya usra jaranteprati vastor asvina.

This aspiration of Agni happens when the Sacrificer withpure hands, with a perfectly discerning vision, with power inhis soul to travel to the end of its pilgrimage, to the goal of thesacrifice through all obstacles, breaking all opposers, has pressedout the immortalising wine with the pressing-stones and thattoo becomes full of the honey of the Ashwins. Yan niktahastastaran. ir vicaks.an. ah. , somam sus.ava madhumantam adribhih. . Forthe individual’s delight in things is met by the Ashwins’ triple sat-isfactions and by the fourth, the delight pouring from the Truth.The cleansed hands of the Sacrificer, niktahastah. , are possiblysymbolic7 of the purified physical being; the power comes froma fulfilled life-energy; the force of clear mental vision, vicaks.an. a,is the sign of the truth-illumined mind. These are the conditionsin mind, life and body for the overflowing of the honey over thetriple satisfactions of the Ashwins.

When the sacrificer has thus pressed out the honey-filleddelight of things in his sacrifice, the flames of the Will are ableto drink them from near, they are not compelled to bring themmeagrely or with pain from a distant and hardly accessible planeof consciousness. Therefore, drinking immediately and freely,they become full of an exultant force and swiftness and run andrace about over the whole field of our being to extend and buildup the lower consciousness into the shining image of the worldof free and luminous Mind. Akenipaso ahabhir davidhvatah. ,svar n. a sukram tanvanta a rajah. . The formula used is repeatedwithout variation from the second Rik; but here it is the flamesof the Will full of the fourfold satisfaction that do the work.There the free upsoaring of the gods by the mere touch of the

6 Savıraya dhiya, R.V. I.3.2.7 The hand or arm is often, however, otherwise symbolic, especially when it is the two

hands or arms of Indra that are in question.


Light and without effort; here the firm labour and aspiration ofman in his sacrifice. For then it is by Time, by the days, that thework is perfected, ahabhih. , by successive dawns of the Trutheach with its victory over the night, by the unbroken successionof the sisters of which we have had mention in the hymn tothe divine Dawn. Man cannot seize or hold at once all that theillumination brings to him; it has to be repeated constantly sothat he may grow in the light.

But not only the fires of the Will are at work to transform thelower consciousness. The Sun of Truth yokes also his lustrouscoursers and is in movement; suras cid asvan yuyujana ıyate. TheAshwins too take knowledge for the human consciousness of allthe paths of its progress so that it may effect a complete, har-monious and many-sided movement. This movement advancingin many paths is combined in the light of the divine knowledgeby the spontaneous self-arranging action of Nature which sheassumes when the will and the knowledge are wedded in the per-fect harmony of a fully self-conscious, intuitively guided action.Visvan anu svadhaya cetathas pathah. .

Vamadeva closes his hymn. He has been able to holdfirmly the shining Thought with its high illumination andhas expressed in himself by the shaping and fixing power ofthe Word the chariot, that is to say, the immortal movementof the delight of the Ashwins; the movement of a bliss thatdoes not fade or grow old or exhaust itself, — it is agelessand undecaying, ajarah. , — because it is drawn by perfect andliberated energies and not by the limited and soon exhausted,soon recalcitrant horses of the human vitality. Pra vam avocamasvina dhiyamdha, rathah. svasvo ajaro yo asti. In this move-ment they traverse in a moment all the worlds of the lowerconsciousness, covering it with their speeding delights, and soarrive to that universal enjoyment in man full of his offeringof the Soma-wine by which they can lead him, puissantlyentering into it, through all opposers and to the great goal.Yena sadyah. pari rajamsi yatho, havis.mantam taran. im bhojamaccha.

XI

The Ribhus, Artisans of Immortality

Rig Veda I.20

ay� d�vAy jmn� �tomo Ev �EBrAsyA akAEr r$DAtm� � ��

1. Lo, the affirmation made for the divine Birth with the breathof the mouth by illumined minds, that gives perfectly thebliss;

y id� Ay vcoy� jA tt0� m'nsA hrF fmFEBy'�mAft � ��

2. Even they who fashioned by the mind for Indra his twobright steeds that are yoked by Speech, and they enjoy thesacrifice by their accomplishings of the work.

t0�As�yA�yA� pEr?mAn� s� K� rTm� t0D�n�� sbd�'GAm� � ��

3. They fashioned for the twin lords of the voyage their happycar of the all-pervading movement, they fashioned the fos-tering cow that yields the sweet milk.

y� vAnA EptrA p� n� s�ym�A !j� yv� !Bvo Ev�X+t � ��

4. O Ribhus, in your pervasion you made young again theParents, you who seek the straight path and have the Truthin your mentalisings.

The Ribhus, Artisans of Immortality 337

s� vo mdAso a�mt�d��Z c mz�vtA aAEd�y�EB�c rAjEB� � "�

5. The raptures of the wine come to you entirely, to you withIndra companioned by the Maruts and with the Kings, thesons of Aditi.

ut �y� cms� nv� �v�V� d�'v�y En�k� tm� akt' ct� r� p� n� � (�

6. And this bowl of Twashtri new and perfected you madeagain into four.

t� no r$AEn D�n E�rA sAJAEn s� vt� ekm�k� s� fE�tEB� � *�

7. So establish for us the thrice seven ecstasies, each separatelyby perfect expressings of them.

aDAryt vh� nyo�Bjt s� k� �yyA BAg� d�v�q� yE�ym� � ,�

8. They sustained and held in them, they divided by perfectionin their works the sacrificial share of the enjoyment amongthe Gods.

COMMENTARY

The Ribhus, it has been suggested, are rays of the Sun. And itis true that like Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga and Aryaman they arepowers of the solar Light, the Truth. But their special characterin the Veda is that they are artisans of Immortality. They are rep-resented as human beings who have attained to the condition ofgodhead by power of knowledge and perfection in their works.Their function is to aid Indra in raising man towards the samestate of divine light and bliss which they themselves have earned

338 Selected Hymns

as their own divine privilege. The hymns addressed to them in theVeda are few and to the first glance exceedingly enigmatical; forthey are full of certain figures and symbols always repeated. Butonce the principal clues of the Veda are known, they become onthe contrary exceedingly clear and simple and present a coherentand interesting idea which sheds a clear light on the Vedic gospelof immortality.

The Ribhus are powers of the Light who have descendedinto Matter and are there born as human faculties aspiring tobecome divine and immortal. In this character they are calledchildren of Sudhanwan,1 a patronymic which is merely a parableof their birth from the full capacities of Matter touched by theluminous energy. But in their real nature they are descendedfrom this luminous Energy and are sometimes so addressed,“Offspring of Indra, grandsons of luminous Force.” For Indra,the divine mind in man, is born out of luminous Force as is Agniout of pure Force, and from Indra the divine Mind spring thehuman aspirations after Immortality.

The names of the three Ribhus are, in the order of theirbirth, Ribhu or Ribhukshan, the skilful Knower or the Shaper inknowledge, Vibhwa or Vibhu, the Pervading, the self-diffusing,and Vaja, the Plenitude. Their names indicate their special natureand function, but they are really a trinity, and therefore, althoughusually termed the Ribhus, they are also called the Vibhus andthe Vajas. Ribhu, the eldest is the first in man who begins toshape by his thoughts and works the forms of immortality;Vibhwa gives pervasiveness to this working; Vaja, the youngest,supplies the plenitude of the divine light and substance by whichthe complete work can be done. These works and formations ofimmortality they effect, it is continually repeated, by the forceof Thought, with the mind for field and material; they are donewith power; they are attended by a perfection in the creative andeffective act, svapasyaya sukr.tyaya, which is the condition of theworking out of Immortality. These formations of the artisans of

1 “Dhanwan” in this name does not mean “bow” but the solid or desert field of Matterotherwise typified as the hill or rock out of which the waters and the rays are delivered.


Immortality are, as they are briefly summarised in the hymnbefore us, the horses of Indra, the car of the Ashwins, the Cowthat gives the sweet milk, the youth of the universal Parents, themultiplication into four of the one drinking-bowl of the godsoriginally fashioned by Twashtri, the Framer of things.

The hymn opens with an indication of its objective. It isan affirmation of the power of the Ribhus made for the divineBirth, made by men whose minds have attained to illuminationand possess that energy of the Light from which the Ribhus wereborn. It is made by the breath of the mouth, the life-power inthe world. Its object is to confirm in the human soul the entiredelight of the Beatitude, the thrice seven ecstasies of the divineLife.2

This divine Birth is represented by the Ribhus who, oncehuman, have become immortal. By their accomplishings of thework, — the great work of upward human evolution which isthe summit of the world-sacrifice, — they have gained in thatsacrifice their divine share and privilege along with the divinepowers. They are the sublimated human energies of formationand upward progress who assist the gods in the divinising ofman. And of all their accomplishings that which is central is theformation of the two brilliant horses of Indra, the horses yokedby speech to their movements, yoked by the Word and fashionedby the mind. For the free movement of the luminous mind, thedivine mind in man, is the condition of all other immortalisingworks.3

The second work of the Ribhus is to fashion the chariot ofthe Ashwins, lords of the human journey, — the happy move-ment of the Ananda in man which pervades with its action allhis worlds or planes of being, bringing health, youth, strength,wholeness to the physical man, capacity of enjoyment andaction to the vital, glad energy of the light to the mental being,— in a word, the force of the pure delight of being in all hismembers.4

2 Ayam devaya janmane, stomo viprebhir asaya; akari ratnadhatamah. .3 Ya indraya vacoyuja, tataks.ur manasa harı; samıbhir yajnam asata.4 Taks.an nasatyabhyam, parijmanam sukham ratham.

340 Selected Hymns

The third work of the Ribhus is to fashion the cow whogives the sweet milk. It is said elsewhere that this cow hasbeen delivered out of its covering skin, — the veil of Nature’soutward movement and action, — by the Ribhus. The fosteringcow herself is she of the universal forms and universal impetusof movement, visvajuvam visvarupam, in other words she isthe first Radiance, Aditi, the infinite Consciousness of the infi-nite conscious Being which is the mother of the worlds. Thatconsciousness is brought out by the Ribhus from the veilingmovement of Nature and a figure of her is fashioned here in usby them. She is, by the action of the powers of the duality, sepa-rated from her offspring, the soul in the lower world; the Ribhusrestore it to constant companionship with its infinite mother.5

Another great work of the Ribhus is in the strength oftheir previous deeds, of the light of Indra, the movement ofthe Ashwins, the full yield of the fostering Cow to restoreyouth to the aged Parents of the world, Heaven and Earth.Heaven is the mental consciousness, Earth the physical. Thesein their union are represented as lying long old and prostratelike fallen sacrificial posts, worn-out and suffering. The Ribhus,it is said, ascend to the house of the Sun where he lives in theunconcealed splendour of his Truth and there slumbering fortwelve days afterwards traverse the heaven and the earth, fillingthem with abundant rain of the streams of Truth, nourishingthem, restoring them to youth and vigour.6 They pervade heavenwith their workings, they bring divine increase to the mentality;7

they give to it and the physical being a fresh and young andimmortal movement.8 For from the home of the Truth theybring with them the perfection of that which is the condition oftheir work, the movement in the straight path of the Truth andthe Truth itself with its absolute effectivity in all the thoughtsand words of the mentality. Carrying this power with them in

5 Taks.an dhenum sabardugham. For the other details see R.V. IV.33.4 and 8, 36.4etc.6 R.V. IV.33.2, 3, 7; 36.1, 3; I.161.7.7 R.V. IV.33.1, 2.8 R.V. V.36.3.


their pervading entry into the lower world, they pour into it theimmortal essence.9

It is the wine of that immortal essence with its ecstasieswhich they win by their works and bring with them to man in hissacrifice. And with them come and sit Indra and the Maruts, thedivine Mind and its Thought-forces, and the four great Kings,sons of Aditi, children of the Infinite, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman,Bhaga, the purity and vastness of the Truth-consciousness, itslaw of love and light and harmony, its power and aspiration, itspure and happy enjoyment of things.10

And there at the sacrifice the gods drink in the fourfold bowl,camasam caturvayam, the pourings of the nectar. For Twashtri,the Framer of things, has given man originally only a singlebowl, the physical consciousness, the physical body in which tooffer the delight of existence to the gods. The Ribhus, powersof luminous knowledge, take it as renewed and perfected byTwashtri’s later workings and build up in him from the materialof the four planes three other bodies, vital, mental and the causalor ideal body.11

Because they have made this fourfold cup of bliss and en-abled him thereby to live on the plane of the Truth-consciousnessthey are able to establish in the perfected human being thethrice seven ecstasies of the supreme existence poured into themind, vitality and body. Each of these they can give perfectly bythe full expression of its separate absolute ecstasy even in thecombination of the whole.12

The Ribhus have power to support and contain all thesefloods of the delight of being in the human consciousness; andthey are able to divide it in the perfection of their works amongthe manifested gods, to each god his sacrificial share. For suchperfect division is the whole condition of the effective sacrifice,the perfect work.13

9 Yuvana pitara punah. , satyamantra r.juyavah. ; r.bhavo vis.t.yakrata.10 Sam vo madasa agmata, indren.a ca marutvata; adityebhis ca rajabhih. .11 Uta tyam camasam navam, tvas.t.ur devasya nis.kr.tam; akarta caturah. punah. .12 Te no ratnani dhattana, trir a saptani sunvate; ekam ekam susastibhih. .13 Adharayanta vahnayo, abhajanta sukr.tyaya; bhagam deves.u yajniyam.

342 Selected Hymns

Such are the Ribhus and they are called to the human sac-rifice to fashion for man the things of immortality even as theyfashioned them for themselves. “He becomes full of plenitudeand strength for the labour, he becomes a Rishi by power ofself-expression, he becomes a hero and a smiter hard to piercein the battles, he holds in himself increase of bliss and entireenergy whom Vaja and Vibhwa, the Ribhus foster. . . . For youare seers and thinkers clear-discerning; as such with this thoughtof our soul we declare to you our knowledge. Do you in yourknowledge moving about our thoughts fashion for us all hu-man enjoyings, — luminous plenitude and fertilising force andsupreme felicity. Here issue, here felicity, here a great energy ofinspiration fashion for us in your delight. Give to us, O Ribhus,that richly-varied plenitude by which we shall awaken in ourconsciousness to things beyond ordinary men.”14

14 R.V. IV.36.6-9.

XII

Vishnu, the All-Pervading Godhead

Rig Veda I.154

Ev�Zon�' k� vFyA'EZ voc� y� pAET'vAEn Evmm� rjA�Es yo a�kBAyd� �r� sD�T� Evc+mAZ��DozgAy� � ��

1. Of Vishnu now I declare the mighty works, who has mea-sured out the earthly worlds and that higher seat of ourself-accomplishing he supports, he the wide-moving, in thethreefold steps of his universal movement.

tE��Z� � �tvt� vFy�'Z m� go n BFm� k� cro EgEr�WA� y�yozq� E�q� Ev+mZ��vEDE0yEt B� vnAEn Ev�vA � ��

2. That Vishnu affirms on high by his mightiness and he is likea terrible lion that ranges in the difficult places, yea, his lairis on the mountain-tops, he in whose three wide movementsall the worlds find their dwelling-place.

Ev�Zv� f� qm�t� mm EgErE0t uzgAyAy v� �Z� y id� dFG: yt� sD�Tm�ko Evmm� E�EBEr�pd�EB� � ��

3. Let our strength and our thought go forward to Vishnu theall-pervading, the wide-moving Bull whose dwelling-placeis on the mountain, he who being One has measured allthis long and far-extending seat of our self-accomplishingby only three of his strides.

y�y �F p� ZA' mD� nA pdAy0FymAZA �vDyA mdEt y u E�DAt� p� ETvFm� t %Am�ko dADAr B� vnAEn Ev�vA � ��

344 Selected Hymns

4. He whose three steps are full of the honey-wine and theyperish not but have ecstasy by the self-harmony of theirnature; yea, he being One holds the triple principle andearth and heaven also, even all the worlds.

td�y E ymEB pATo a�yA� nro y� d�vyvo mdEt uz+m�y s Eh bD� Er�TA Ev�Zo� pd� prm� m2v u�s� � "�

5. May I attain to and enjoy that goal of his movement, theDelight, where souls that seek the godhead have the rapture;for there in that highest step of the wide-moving Vishnu isthat Friend of men who is the fount of the sweetness.

tA vA� vA�t� y� �mEs gm2y� y� gAvo B� Erf� YA ayAs� a�Ah td� zgAy�y v� �Z� prm� pdmv BAEt B� Er � (�

6. Those are the dwelling-places of ye twain which we desireas the goal of our journey where the many-horned herds ofLight go travelling; the highest step of wide-moving Vishnushines down on us here in its manifold vastness.

COMMENTARY

The deity of this hymn is Vishnu the all-pervading, who inthe Rig Veda has a close but covert connection and almostan identity with the other deity exalted in the later religion,Rudra. Rudra is a fierce and violent godhead with a beneficentaspect which approaches the supreme blissful reality of Vishnu;Vishnu’s constant friendliness to man and his helping gods isshadowed by an aspect of formidable violence, — “like a terriblelion ranging in evil and difficult places”, — which is spoken ofin terms more ordinarily appropriate to Rudra. Rudra is thefather of the vehemently-battling Maruts; Vishnu is hymned inthe last Sukta of the fifth Mandala under the name of EvayaMarut as the source from which they sprang, that which theybecome and himself identical with the unity and totality of theirembattled forces. Rudra is the Deva or Deity ascending in the

Vishnu, the All-Pervading Godhead 345

cosmos, Vishnu the same Deva or Deity helping and evoking thepowers of the ascent.

It was a view long popularised by European scholars thatthe greatness of Vishnu and Shiva in the Puranic theogonies wasa later development and that in the Veda these gods have a quiteminor position and are inferior to Indra and Agni. It has evenbecome a current opinion among many scholars that Shiva wasa later conception borrowed from the Dravidians and representsa partial conquest of the Vedic religion by the indigenous cultureit had invaded. These errors arise inevitably as part of the totalmisunderstanding of Vedic thought for which the old Brahmanicritualism is responsible and to which European scholarship bythe exaggeration of a minor and external element in the Vedicmythology has only given a new and yet more misleading form.

The importance of the Vedic gods has not to be measuredby the number of hymns devoted to them or by the extent towhich they are invoked in the thoughts of the Rishis, but bythe functions which they perform. Agni and Indra to whom themajority of the Vedic hymns are addressed, are not greater thanVishnu and Rudra, but the functions which they fulfil in theinternal and external world were the most active, dominant anddirectly effective for the psychological discipline of the ancientMystics; this alone is the reason of their predominance. TheMaruts, children of Rudra, are not divinities superior to theirfierce and mighty Father; but they have many hymns addressedto them and are far more constantly mentioned in connectionwith other gods, because the function they fulfilled was of a con-stant and immediate importance in the Vedic discipline. On theother hand, Vishnu, Rudra, Brahmanaspati, the Vedic originalsof the later Puranic Triad, Vishnu-Shiva-Brahma, provide theconditions of the Vedic work and assist it from behind the morepresent and active gods, but are less close to it and in appearanceless continually concerned in its daily movements.

Brahmanaspati is the creator by the Word; he calls lightand visible cosmos out of the darkness of the inconscient oceanand speeds the formations of conscious being upward to theirsupreme goal. It is from this creative aspect of Brahmanaspati

346 Selected Hymns

that the later conception of Brahma the Creator arose.For the upward movement of Brahmanaspati’s formations

Rudra supplies the force. He is named in the Veda the MightyOne of Heaven, but he begins his work upon the earth and giveseffect to the sacrifice on the five planes of our ascent. He is theViolent One who leads the upward evolution of the consciousbeing; his force battles against all evil, smites the sinner andthe enemy; intolerant of defect and stumbling he is the mostterrible of the gods, the one of whom alone the Vedic Rishishave any real fear. Agni, the Kumara, prototype of the PuranicSkanda, is on earth the child of this force of Rudra. The Maruts,vital powers which make light for themselves by violence, areRudra’s children. Agni and the Maruts are the leaders of thefierce struggle upward from Rudra’s first earthly, obscure cre-ation to the heavens of thought, the luminous worlds. But thisviolent and mighty Rudra who breaks down all defective for-mations and groupings of outward and inward life, has also abenigner aspect. He is the supreme healer. Opposed, he destroys;called on for aid and propitiated he heals all wounds and all eviland all sufferings. The force that battles is his gift, but alsothe final peace and joy. In these aspects of the Vedic god areall the primitive materials necessary for the evolution of thePuranic Shiva-Rudra, the destroyer and healer, the auspiciousand terrible, the Master of the force that acts in the worlds andthe Yogin who enjoys the supreme liberty and peace.

For the formations of Brahmanaspati’s word, for the actionsof Rudra’s force Vishnu supplies the necessary static elements,— Space, the ordered movements of the worlds, the ascendinglevels, the highest goal. He has taken three strides and in thespace created by the three strides has established all the worlds.In these worlds he the all-pervading dwells and gives less orgreater room to the action and movements of the gods. WhenIndra would slay Vritra, he first prays to Vishnu, his friendand comrade in the great struggle, “O Vishnu, pace out in thymovement with an utter wideness,” and in that wideness hedestroys Vritra who limits, Vritra who covers. The supreme stepof Vishnu, his highest seat, is the triple world of bliss and light,


priyam padam, which the wise ones see extended in heaven likea shining eye of vision; it is this highest seat of Vishnu that isthe goal of the Vedic journey. Here again the Vedic Vishnu is thenatural precursor and sufficient origin of the Puranic Narayana,Preserver and Lord of Love.

In the Veda indeed its fundamental conception forbidsthe Puranic arrangement of the supreme Trinity and the lessergods. To the Vedic Rishis there was only one universal Devaof whom Vishnu, Rudra, Brahmanaspati, Agni, Indra, Vayu,Mitra, Varuna are all alike forms and cosmic aspects. Each ofthem is in himself the whole Deva and contains all the othergods. It was the full emergence in the Upanishads of the idea ofthis supreme and only Deva, left in the Riks vague and undefinedand sometimes even spoken of in the neuter as That or the onesole existence, the ritualistic limitation of the other gods and theprogressive precision of their human or personal aspects underthe stress of a growing mythology that led to their degradationand the enthronement of the less used and more general namesand forms, Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra, in the final Puranicformulation of the Hindu theogony.

In this hymn of Dirghatamas Auchathya to the all-pervadingVishnu it is his significant activity, it is the greatness of Vishnu’sthree strides that is celebrated. We must dismiss from our mindsthe ideas proper to the later mythology. We have nothing to dohere with the dwarf Vishnu, the Titan Bali and the three divinestrides which took possession of Earth, Heaven and the sunlesssubterrestrial worlds of Patala. The three strides of Vishnu in theVeda are clearly defined by Dirghatamas as earth, heaven and thetriple principle, tridhatu. It is this triple principle beyond Heavenor superimposed upon it as its highest level, nakasya pr.s.t.he,which is the supreme stride or supreme seat of the all-pervadingdeity.

Vishnu is the wide-moving one. He is that which has goneabroad — as it is put in the language of the Isha Upanishad,sa paryagat, — triply extending himself as Seer, Thinker andFormer, in the superconscient Bliss, in the heaven of mind, inthe earth of the physical consciousness, tredha vicakraman. ah. .

348 Selected Hymns

In those three strides he has measured out, he has formed inall their extension the earthly worlds; for in the Vedic idea thematerial world which we inhabit is only one of several stepsleading to and supporting the vital and mental worlds beyond.In those strides he supports upon the earth and mid-world, —the earth the material, the mid-world the vital realms of Vayu,Lord of the dynamic Life-principle, — the triple heaven and itsthree luminous summits, trın. i rocana. These heavens the Rishidescribes as the higher seat of the fulfilling. Earth, the mid-world and heaven are the triple place of the conscious being’sprogressive self-fulfilling, tris.adhastha, earth the lower seat, thevital world the middle, heaven the higher. All these are containedin the threefold movement of Vishnu.1

But there is more; there is also the world where the self-fulfilment is accomplished, Vishnu’s highest stride. In the secondverse the seer speaks of it simply as “that”; “that” Vishnu, mov-ing yet forward in his third pace affirms or firmly establishes,pra stavate, by his divine might. Vishnu is then described inlanguage which hints at his essential identity with the terribleRudra, the fierce and dangerous Lion of the worlds who begins inthe evolution as the Master of the animal, Pashupati, and movesupward on the mountain of being on which he dwells, rangingthrough more and more difficult and inaccessible places, till hestands upon the summits. Thus in these three wide movementsof Vishnu all the five worlds and their creatures have their habi-tation. Earth, heaven and “that” world of bliss are the threestrides. Between earth and heaven is the Antariksha, the vitalworlds, literally “the intervening habitation”. Between heavenand the world of bliss is another vast Antariksha or interveninghabitation, Maharloka, the world of the superconscient Truthof things.2

The force and the thought of man, the force that proceedsfrom Rudra the Mighty and the thought that proceeds from

1 Vis.n.or nu kam vıryan. i pra vocam, yah. parthivani vimame rajamsi; yo askabhayaduttaram sadhastham, vicakraman.as tredhorugayah. .2 Pra tad vis.n.uh. stavate vıryen. a, mr.go na bhımah. kucaro giris.t.hah. ; yasyorus.u tris.u

vikraman.es.u, adhiks.iyanti bhuvanani visva.


Brahmanaspati, the creative Master of the Word, have to goforward in the great journey for or towards this Vishnu whostands at the goal, on the summit, on the peak of the mountain.His is this wide universal movement; he is the Bull of the worldwho enjoys and fertilises all the energies of force and all thetrooping herds of the thought. This far-flung extended spacewhich appears to us as the world of our self-fulfilment, as thetriple altar of the great sacrifice has been so measured out, soformed by only three strides of that almighty Infinite.3

All the three are full of the honey-wine of the delight ofexistence. All of them this Vishnu fills with his divine joy of be-ing. By that they are eternally maintained and they do not wasteor perish, but in the self-harmony of their natural movementhave always the unfailing ecstasy, the imperishable intoxicationof their wide and limitless existence. Vishnu maintains themunfailingly, preserves them imperishably. He is the One, he aloneis, the sole-existing Godhead, and he holds in his being the tripledivine principle to which we attain in the world of bliss, earthwhere we have our foundation and heaven also which we touchby the mental person within us. All the five worlds he upholds.4

The tridhatu, the triple principle or triple material of existence,is the Sachchidananda of the Vedanta; in the ordinary languageof the Veda it is vasu, substance, urj, abounding force of ourbeing, priyam or mayas, delight and love in the very essence ofour existence. Of these three things all that exists is constitutedand we attain to their fullness when we arrive at the goal of ourjourney.

That goal is Delight, the last of Vishnu’s three strides. TheRishi takes up the indefinite word “tat” by which he first vaguelyindicated it; it signified the delight that is the goal of Vishnu’smovement. It is the Ananda which for man in his ascent is aworld in which he tastes divine delight, possesses the full energyof infinite consciousness, realises his infinite existence. There is

3 Pra vis.n. ave sus.am etu manma, giriks.ita urugayaya vr.s.n. e; ya idam dırgham prayatamsadhastham, eko vimame tribhir it padebhih. .4 Yasya trı purn. a madhuna padani, aks.ıyaman. a svadhaya madanti; ya u tridhatu

pr.thivım uta dyam, eko dadhara bhuvanani visva.

350 Selected Hymns

that high-placed source of the honey-wine of existence of whichthe three strides of Vishnu are full. There the souls that seekthe godhead live in the utter ecstasy of that wine of sweetness.There in the supreme stride, in the highest seat of wide-movingVishnu is the fountain of the honey-wine, the source of thedivine sweetness, — for that which dwells there is the Godhead,the Deva, the perfect Friend and Lover of the souls that aspireto him, the unmoving and utter reality of Vishnu to which thewide-moving God in the cosmos ascends.5

These are the two, Vishnu of the movement here, the eter-nally stable, bliss-enjoying Deva there, and it is those supremedwelling-places of the Twain, it is the triple world of Sachchid-ananda which we desire as the goal of this long journey, this greatupward movement. It is thither that the many-horned herds ofthe conscious Thought, the conscious Force are moving — that isthe goal, that is their resting-place. There in those worlds, gleam-ing down on us here, is the vast, full, illimitable shining of thesupreme stride, the highest seat of the wide-moving Bull, masterand leader of all those many-horned herds, — Vishnu the all-pervading, the cosmic Deity, the Lover and Friend of our souls,the Lord of the transcendent existence and the transcendentdelight.6

5 Tad asya priyam abhi patho asyam, naro yatra devayavo madanti; urukramasya sahi bandhur ittha, vis.n.oh. pade parame madhva utsah. .6 Ta vam vastuni usmasi gamadhyai, yatra gavo bhurisr.nga ayasah. ; atraha tad

urugayasya vr.s.n. ah. , paramam padam ava bhati bhuri.

XIII

Soma, Lord of Delightand Immortality

Rig Veda IX.83

pEv�� t� Evtt� b�LZ�pt� B� gA'�AEZ py�'Eq Ev�vt� atJtn� n' tdAmo a[� t� f� tAs i�ht�t�smAft � ��

l. Wide spread out for thee is the sieve of thy purifying, OMaster of the soul; becoming in the creature thou pervadesthis members all through. He tastes not that delight who isunripe and whose body has not suffered in the heat of thefire; they alone are able to bear that and enjoy it who havebeen prepared by the flame.

tpo�pEv�� Evtt� Edv�pd� focto a�y ttvo 4yE�Trn� av�y�y pvFtArmAfvo Edv�p� �WmED Et�WEt c�tsA � ��

2. The strainer through which the heat of him is purified isspread out in the seat of Heaven; its threads shine out andstand extended. His swift ecstasies foster the soul that puri-fies him; he ascends to the high level of Heaven by theconscious heart.

a#zcd� qs� p� E[rEg�y u0A EbBEt' B� vnAEn vAjy� � mAyAEvno mEmr� a�y mAyyA n� c0s� Eptro gB'mA dD� � � ��

3. This is the supreme dappled Bull that makes the Dawns toshine out, the Male that bears the worlds of the becomingand seeks the plenitude; the Fathers who had the formingknowledge made a form of him by that power of knowledge

352 Selected Hymns

which is his; strong in vision they set him within as a childto be born.

gDv' i�TA pdm�y r0Et pAEt d�vAnA� jEnmAy\� t� g� �ZAEt Erp�� EnDyA EnDApEt� s� k� �mA mD� no B0mAft � ��

4. As the Gandharva he guards his true seat; as the supremeand wonderful One he keeps the births of the gods; Lordof the inner setting, by the inner setting he seizes the en-emy. Those who are utterly perfected in works taste theenjoyment of his honey-sweetness.

hEvh'Ev�mo mEh s� d�4y� nBo vsAn� pEr yA�y2vrm� rAjA pEv�rTo vAjmAzh� sh5B� E�Vj'yEs )vo b� ht� � "�

5. O Thou in whom is the food, thou art that divine food,thou art the vast, the divine home; wearing heaven as a robethou encompassest the march of the sacrifice. King withthe sieve of thy purifying for thy chariot thou ascendest tothe plenitude; with thy thousand burning brilliances thouconquerest the vast knowledge.

COMMENTARY

It is a marked, an essential feature of the Vedic hymns that,although the Vedic cult was not monotheistic in the modernsense of the word, yet they continually recognise, sometimesquite openly and simply, sometimes in a complex and difficultfashion, always as an underlying thought, that the many god-heads whom they invoke are really one Godhead, — One withmany names, revealed in many aspects, approaching man in themask of many divine personalities. Western scholars, puzzledby this religious attitude which presents no difficulty whateverto the Indian mind, have invented, in order to explain it, atheory of Vedic henotheism. The Rishis, they thought, werepolytheists, but to each God at the time of worshipping himthey gave preeminence and even regarded him as in a way the

Soma, Lord of Delight and Immortality 353

sole deity. This invention of henotheism is the attempt of analien mentality to understand and account for the Indian ideaof one Divine Existence who manifests Himself in many namesand forms, each of which is for the worshipper of that nameand form the one and supreme Deity. That idea of the Divine,fundamental to the Puranic religions, was already possessed byour Vedic forefathers.

The Veda already contains in the seed the Vedantic concep-tion of the Brahman. It recognises an Unknowable, a timelessExistence, the Supreme which is neither today nor tomorrow,moving in the movement of the Gods, but itself vanishing fromthe attempt of the mind to seize it (R.V. I.170.1). It is spoken ofin the neuter as That and often identified with the Immortality,the supreme triple Principle, the vast Bliss to which the humanbeing aspires. The Brahman is the Unmoving, the Oneness ofthe Gods. “The Unmoving is born as the Vast in the seat of theCow (Aditi), . . . the vast, the mightiness of the Gods, the One”(III.55.1). It is the one Existent to whom the seers give differentnames, Indra, Matarishwan, Agni, (I.164.46).

This Brahman, the one Existence, thus spoken of imperson-ally in the neuter, is also conceived as the Deva, the supremeGodhead, the Father of things who appears here as the Son inthe human soul. He is the Blissful One to whom the movement ofthe Gods ascends, manifest as at once the Male and the Female,vr.s.an, dhenu. Each of the Gods is a manifestation, an aspect,a personality of the one Deva. He can be realised through anyof his names and aspects, through Indra, through Agni, throughSoma; for each of them being in himself all the Deva and onlyin his front or aspect to us different from the others contains allthe gods in himself.

Thus Agni is hymned as the supreme and universal Deva.“Thou O Agni, art Varuna when thou art born, thou becomestMitra when thou art perfectly kindled, in thee are all theGods, O Son of Force, thou art Indra to the mortal who givesthe sacrifice. Thou becomest Aryaman when thou bearest thesecret name of the Virgins. They make thee to shine with theradiances (the cows, gobhih. ) as Mitra well-established when

354 Selected Hymns

thou makest of one mind the Lord of the house and his consort.For the glory of thee, O Rudra, the Maruts brighten by theirpressure that which is the brilliant and varied birth of thee.That which is the highest seat of Vishnu, by that thou protectestthe secret Name of the radiances (the cows, gonam). By thyglory, O Deva, the gods attain to right vision and holdingin themselves all the multiplicity (of the vast manifestation)taste Immortality. Men set Agni in them as the priest of thesacrifice when desiring (the Immortality) they distribute (tothe Gods) the self-expression of the being. . . . Do thou inthy knowledge extricate the Father and drive away (sin anddarkness), he who is borne in us as thy Son, O Child of Force”(V.3). Indra is similarly hymned by Vamadeva and in thiseighty-third Sukta of the ninth Mandala, as in several others,Soma too emerges from his special functions as the supremeDeity.

Soma is the Lord of the wine of delight, the wine of im-mortality. Like Agni he is found in the plants, the growths ofearth, and in the waters. The Soma-wine used in the externalsacrifice is the symbol of this wine of delight. It is pressed outby the pressing-stone (adri, gravan) which has a close symbolicconnection with the thunderbolt, the formed electric force ofIndra also called adri. The Vedic hymns speak of the luminousthunders of this stone as they speak of the light and soundof Indra’s weapon. Once pressed out as the delight of existenceSoma has to be purified through a strainer (pavitra) and throughthe strainer he streams in his purity into the wine bowl (camu) inwhich he is brought to the sacrifice, or he is kept in jars (kalasa)for Indra’s drinking. Or, sometimes, the symbol of the bowl orthe jar is neglected and Soma is simply described as flowingin a river of delight to the seat of the Gods, to the home ofImmortality. That these things are symbols is very clear in mostof the hymns of the ninth Mandala which are all devoted to theGod Soma. Here, for instance, the physical system of the humanbeing is imaged as the jar of the Soma-wine and the strainerthrough which it is purified is said to be spread out in the seatof Heaven, divas pade.


The hymn begins with an imagery which closely follows thephysical facts of the purifying of the wine and its pouring into thejar. The strainer or purifying instrument spread out in the seat ofHeaven seems to be the mind enlightened by knowledge (cetas);the human system is the jar. Pavitram te vitatam brahman. aspate,the strainer is spread wide for thee, O Master of the soul; pra-bhur gatran. i paryes.i visvatah. , becoming manifest thou pervadestor goest about the limbs everywhere. Soma is addressed here asBrahmanaspati, a word sometimes applied to other gods, butusually reserved for Brihaspati, Master of the creative Word.Brahman in the Veda is the soul or soul-consciousness emergingfrom the secret heart of things, but more often the thought,inspired, creative, full of the secret truth, which emerges fromthat consciousness and becomes thought of the mind, manma.Here, however, it seems to mean the soul itself. Soma, Lordof the Ananda, is the true creator who possesses the soul andbrings out of it a divine creation. For him the mind and heart,enlightened, have been formed into a purifying instrument; freedfrom all narrowness and duality the consciousness in it has beenextended widely to receive the full flow of the sense-life andmind-life and turn it into pure delight of the true existence, thedivine, the immortal Ananda.

So received, sifted, strained, the Soma-wine of life turnedinto Ananda comes pouring into all the members of the humansystem as into a wine-jar and flows through all of them com-pletely in their every part. As the body of a man becomes fullof the touch and exultation of strong wine, so all the physicalsystem becomes full of the touch and exultation of this divineAnanda. The words prabhu and vibhu in the Veda are used not inthe later sense, “lord”, but in a fixed psychological significancelike pracetas and vicetas or like prajnana and vijnana in the laterlanguage. “Vibhu” means becoming, or coming into existencepervasively, “prabhu” becoming, coming into existence in frontof the consciousness, at a particular point as a particular objector experience. Soma comes out like the wine dropping fromthe strainer and then pervading the jar; it emerges into the con-sciousness concentrated at some particular point, prabhu, or as

356 Selected Hymns

some particular experience and then pervades the whole beingas Ananda, vibhu.

But it is not every human system that can hold, sustain andenjoy the potent and often violent ecstasy of that divine delight.Ataptatanur na tad amo asnute, he who is raw and his bodynot heated does not taste or enjoy that; sr.tasa id vahantas tatsamasata, only those who have been baked in the fire bear andentirely enjoy that. The wine of the divine Life poured into thesystem is a strong, overflooding and violent ecstasy; it cannot beheld in the system unprepared for it by strong endurance of theutmost fires of life and suffering and experience. The raw earthenvessel not baked to consistency in the fire of the kiln cannothold the Soma-wine; it breaks and spills the precious liquid. Sothe physical system of the man who drinks this strong wine ofAnanda must by suffering and conquering all the torturing heatsof life have been prepared for the secret and fiery heats of theSoma; otherwise his conscious being will not be able to hold it;it will spill and lose it as soon as or even before it is tasted or itwill break down mentally and physically under the touch.

This strong and fiery wine has to be purified and the strainerfor its purifying has been spread out wide to receive it in theseat of heaven, tapos. pavitram vitatam divas pade; its threadsor fibres are all of pure light and stand out like rays, socantoasya tantavo vyasthiran. Through these fibres the wine hasto come streaming. The image evidently refers to the purifiedmental and emotional consciousness, the conscious heart, cetas,whose thoughts and emotions are the threads or fibres. Dyausor Heaven is the pure mental principle not subjected to thereactions of the nerves and the body. In the seat of Heaven, —the pure mental being as distinguished from the vital and phys-ical consciousness, — the thoughts and emotions become purerays of true perception and happy psychical vibration insteadof the troubled and obscured mental, emotional and sensationalreactions that we now possess. Instead of being contracted andquivering things defending themselves from pain and excess ofthe shocks of experience they stand out free, strong and bright,happily extended to receive and turn into divine ecstasy all


possible contacts of universal existence. Therefore it is divaspade, in the seat of Heaven, that the Soma-strainer is spread outto receive the Soma.

Thus received and purified these keen and violent juices,these swift and intoxicating powers of the Wine no longer dis-turb the mind or hurt the body, are no longer spilled and lostbut foster and increase, avanti, mind and body of their purifier;avantyasya pavıtaram asavo. So increasing him in all delight ofhis mental, emotional, sensational and physical being they risewith him through the purified and blissful heart to the highestlevel or surface of heaven, that is, to the luminous world of Swarwhere the mind capable of intuition, inspiration, revelation isbathed in the splendours of the Truth (r.tam), liberated into theinfinity of the Vast (br.hat). Divas pr.s.t.ham adhi tis.t.hanti cetasa.

So far the Rishi has spoken of Soma in his impersonal mani-festation, as the Ananda or delight of divine existence in the hu-man being’s conscious experience. He now turns, as is the habitof the Vedic Rishis, from the divine manifestation to the divinePerson and at once Soma appears as the supreme Personality,the high and universal Deva. Arurucad us.asah. pr.snir agriyah. ;the supreme dappled One, he makes the dawns to shine: uks.abibharti bhuvanani vajayuh. ; he, the Bull, bears the worlds, seek-ing the plenitude. The word pr.snih. , dappled, is used both of theBull, the supreme Male, and of the Cow, the female Energy; likeall words of colour, sveta, sukra, hari, harit, kr.s.n. a, hiran. yaya,in the Veda it is symbolic; colour, varn. a, has always denotedquality, temperament, etc., in the language of the Mystics. Thedappled Bull is the Deva in the variety of his manifestation,many-hued. Soma is that first supreme dappled Bull, generatorof the worlds of the becoming, for from the Ananda, from theall-blissful One they all proceed; delight is the parent of thevariety of existences. He is the Bull, uks.an, a word which like itssynonym vr.s.an, means diffusing, generating, impregnating, thefather of abundance, the Bull, the Male; it is he who fertilisesForce of consciousness, Nature, the Cow, and produces andbears in his stream of abundance the worlds. He makes theDawns shine out, — the dawns of illumination, mothers of the

358 Selected Hymns

radiant herds of the Sun; and he seeks the plenitude, that is tosay the fullness of being, force, consciousness, the plenty of thegodhead which is the condition of the divine delight. In otherwords it is the Lord of the Ananda who gives us the splendoursof the Truth and the plenitudes of the Vast by which we attainto Immortality.

The fathers who discovered the Truth, received his creativeknowledge, his Maya, and by that ideal and ideative conscious-ness of the supreme Divinity they formed an image of Him inman, they established Him in the race as a child unborn, a seedof the godhead in man, a Birth that has to be delivered out of theenvelope of the human consciousness. Mayavino mamire asyamayaya, nr.caks.asah. pitaro garbham a dadhuh. . The fathers arethe ancient Rishis who discovered the Way of the Vedic mysticsand are supposed to be still spiritually present presiding overthe destinies of the race and, like the gods, working in man forhis attainment to Immortality. They are the sages who receivedthe strong divine vision, nr.caks.asah. , the Truth-vision by whichthey were able to find the Cows hidden by the Panis and topass beyond the bounds of the Rodasi, the mental and physicalconsciousness, to the Superconscient, the Vast Truth and theBliss (R.V. I.36.7, IV.1.13-18, IV.2.15-18 etc.).

Soma is the Gandharva, the Lord of the hosts of delight,and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane ofthe Ananda; gandharva ittha padam asya raks.ati. He is theSupreme, standing out from all other beings and over them,other than they and wonderful, adbhuta, and as the supremeand transcendent, present in the worlds but exceeding them,he protects in those worlds the births of the gods, pati devanamjanimani adbhutah. . The “births of the gods” is a common phrasein the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of the divineprinciples in the cosmos and especially the formation of thegodhead in its manifold forms in the human being. In the lastverse the Rishi spoke of the Deva as the divine child preparingfor birth, involved in the world, in the human consciousness.Here he speaks of Him as the transcendent guarding the worldof the Ananda formed in man and the forms of the godhead


born in him by the divine knowledge against the attacks ofthe enemies, the powers of division, the powers of undelight(dvis.ah. , aratıh. ), against the undivine hosts with their formationsof a dark and false creative knowledge, Avidya, illusion, (adevırmayah. ).

For he seizes these invading enemies in the net of theinner consciousness; he is the master of a profounder andtruer setting of world-truth and world-experience than thatwhich is formed by the senses and the superficial mind. Itis by this inner setting that he seizes the powers of false-hood, obscurity and division and subjects them to the lawof truth, light and unity; gr.bhn. ati ripum nidhaya nidhapatih. .Men therefore protected by the lord of the Ananda governingthis inner nature are able to accord their thoughts and actionswith the inner truth and light and are no longer made tostumble by the forces of the outer crookedness; they walkstraight, they become entirely perfect in their works and bythis truth of inner working and outer action are able totaste the entire sweetness of existence, the honey, the delightthat is the food of the soul. Sukr.ttama madhuno bhaks.amasata.

Soma manifests here as the offering, the divine food, thewine of delight and immortality, havih. , and as the Deva, lordof that divine offering (havis.mah. ), above as the vast and divineseat, the superconscient bliss and truth, br.hat, from which thewine descends to us. As the wine of delight he flows about andenters into this great march of the sacrifice which is the progressof man from the physical to the superconscient. He enters intoit and encompasses it wearing the cloud of the heavenly ether,nabhas, the mental principle, as his robe and veil. Havir havis.momahi sadma daivyam, nabho vasanah. pari yasi adhvaram. Thedivine delight comes to us wearing the luminous-cloudy veil ofthe forms of mental experience.

In that march or sacrificial ascent the all-blissful Deva be-comes the King of all our activities, master of our divinisednature and its energies and with the enlightened conscious heartas his chariot ascends into the plenitude of the infinite and

360 Selected Hymns

immortal state. Like a Sun or a fire, as Surya, as Agni, engirt witha thousand blazing energies he conquers the vast regions of theinspired truth, the superconscient knowledge; raja pavitrarathovajam aruhah. , sahasrabhr.s.t.ir jayasi sravo br.hat. The image isthat of a victorious king, sun-like in force and glory, conqueringa wide territory. It is the immortality that he wins for man inthe vast truth-consciousness, sravas, upon which is founded theimmortal state. It is his own true seat, ittha padam asya, that theGod concealed in man conquers ascending out of the darknessand the twilight through the glories of the Dawn into the solarplenitudes.

** *

With this hymn I close this series of selected hymns from theRig Veda. My object has been to show in as brief a compassas possible the real functions of the Vedic gods, the sense ofthe symbols in which their cult is expressed, the nature of thesacrifice and its goal, explaining by actual examples the secret ofthe Veda. I have purposely selected a few brief and easy hymns,and avoided those which have a more striking depth, subtletyand complexity of thought and image, — alike those which bearthe psychological sense plainly and fully on their surface andthose which by their very strangeness and profundity revealtheir true character of mystic and sacred poems. It is hopedthat these examples will be sufficient to show the reader whocares to study them with an open mind the real sense of this,our earliest and greatest poetry. By other translations of a moregeneral character it will be shown that these ideas are not merelythe highest thought of a few Rishis, but the pervading sense andteaching of the Rig Veda.

Part Three

Hymns of the Atris

Foreword

TO TRANSLATE the Veda is to border upon an attempt atthe impossible. For while a literal English rendering of thehymns of the ancient Illuminates would be a falsification

of their sense and spirit, a version which aimed at bringing allthe real thought to the surface would be an interpretation ratherthan a translation. I have essayed a sort of middle path, — a freeand plastic form which shall follow the turns of the original andyet admit a certain number of interpretative devices sufficient forthe light of the Vedic truth to gleam out from its veil of symboland image.

The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritualformulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems. Theinner sense is psychological, universal, impersonal; the ostensi-ble significance and the figures which were meant to reveal tothe initiates what they concealed from the ignorant, are to allappearance crudely concrete, intimately personal, loosely occa-sional and allusive. To this lax outer garb the Vedic poets aresometimes careful to give a clear and coherent form quite otherthan the strenuous inner soul of their meaning; their languagethen becomes a cunningly woven mask for hidden truths. Moreoften they are negligent of the disguise which they use, andwhen they thus rise above their instrument, a literal and exter-nal translation gives either a bizarre, unconnected sequence ofsentences or a form of thought and speech strange and remoteto the uninitiated intelligence. It is only when the figures andsymbols are made to suggest their concealed equivalents thatthere emerges out of the obscurity a transparent and well-linkedthough close and subtle sequence of spiritual, psychologicaland religious ideas. It is this method of suggestion that I haveattempted.

It would have been possible to present a literal version on

364 Hymns of the Atris

condition of following it up by pages of commentary chargedwith the real sense of the words and the hidden message ofthe thought. But this would be a cumbrous method useful onlyto the scholar and the careful student. Some form of the sensewas needed which would compel only so much pause of theintelligence over its object as would be required by any mysticand figurative poetry. To bring about such a form it is not enoughto translate the Sanskrit word into the English; the significantname, the conventional figure, the symbolic image have alsofrequently to be rendered.

If the images preferred by the ancient sages had been suchas the modern mind could easily grasp, if the symbols of thesacrifice were still familiar to us and the names of the Vedic godsstill carried their old psychological significance, — as the Greekor Latin names of classical deities, Aphrodite or Ares, Venus orMinerva, still bear their sense for a cultured European, — thedevice of an interpretative translation could have been avoided.But India followed another curve of literary and religious devel-opment than the culture of the West. Other names of Gods havereplaced the Vedic names or else these have remained but withonly an external and diminished significance; the Vedic ritual,well-nigh obsolete, has lost its profound symbolic meaning; thepastoral, martial and rural images of the early Aryan poets soundremote, inappropriate, or, if natural and beautiful, yet void of theold deeper significance to the imagination of their descendants.Confronted with the stately hymns of the ancient dawn, we areconscious of a blank incomprehension. And we leave them asa prey to the ingenuity of the scholar who gropes for forcedmeanings amid obscurities and incongruities where the ancientsbathed their souls in harmony and light.

A few examples will show what the gulf is and how it wascreated. When we write in a recognised and conventional im-agery, “Laxmi and Saraswati refuse to dwell under one roof”,the European reader may need a note or a translation of thephrase into its plain unfigured thought, “Wealth and Learningseldom go together”, before he can understand, but every Indianalready possesses the sense of the phrase. But if another culture

Foreword 365

and religion had replaced the Puranic and Brahminical and theold books and the Sanskrit language had ceased to be read andunderstood, this now familiar phrase would have been as mean-ingless in India as in Europe. Some infallible commentator oringenious scholar might have been proving to our entire satis-faction that Laxmi was the Dawn and Saraswati the Night orthat they were two irreconcilable chemical substances — or oneknows not what else! It is something of this kind that has over-taken the ancient clarities of the Veda; the sense is dead and onlythe obscurity of a forgotten poetic form remains. Therefore whenwe read “Sarama by the path of the Truth discovers the herds”,the mind is stopped and baffled by an unfamiliar language. Ithas to be translated to us, like the phrase about Saraswati tothe European, into a plainer and less figured thought, “Intuitionby the way of the Truth arrives at the hidden illuminations.”Lacking the clue, we wander into ingenuities about the Dawnand the Sun or even imagine in Sarama, the hound of heaven,a mythological personification of some prehistoric embassy toDravidian nations for the recovery of plundered cattle!

And the whole of the Veda is conceived in such images.The resultant obscurity and confusion for our intelligence isappalling and it will be at once evident how useless would beany translation of the hymns which did not strive at the sametime to be an interpretation. “Dawn and Night,” runs an im-pressive Vedic verse, “two sisters of different forms but of onemind, suckle the same divine Child.” We understand nothing.Dawn and Night are of different forms, but why of one mind?And who is the child? If it is Agni, the fire, what are we tounderstand by Dawn and Night suckling alternately an infantfire? But the Vedic poet is not thinking of the physical night, thephysical dawn or the physical fire. He is thinking of the alter-nations in his own spiritual experience, its constant rhythm ofperiods of a sublime and golden illumination and other periodsof obscuration or relapse into normal unillumined consciousnessand he confesses the growth of the infant strength of the divinelife within him through all these alternations and even by thevery force of their regular vicissitude. For in both states there


works, hidden or manifest, the same divine intention and thesame high-reaching labour. Thus an image which to the Vedicmind was clear, luminous, subtle, profound, striking, comes tous void of sense or poor and incoherent in sense and thereforeaffects us as inflated and pretentious, the ornament of an inaptand bungling literary craftsmanship.

So too when the seer of the house of Atri cries high to Agni,“O Agni, O Priest of the offering, loose from us the cords,”he is using not only a natural, but a richly-laden image. He isthinking of the triple cord of mind, nerves and body by whichthe soul is bound as a victim in the great world-sacrifice, thesacrifice of the Purusha; he is thinking of the force of the divineWill already awakened and at work within him, a fiery andirresistible godhead that shall uplift his oppressed divinity andcleave asunder the cords of its bondage; he is thinking of themight of that growing Strength and inner Flame which receivingall that he has to offer carries it to its own distant and difficulthome, to the high-seated Truth, to the Far, to the Secret, tothe Supreme. All these associations are lost to us; our mindsare obsessed by ideas of a ritual sacrifice and a material cord.We imagine perhaps the son of Atri bound as a victim in anancient barbaric sacrifice, crying to the god of Fire for a physicaldeliverance!

A little later the seer sings of the increasing Flame, “Agnishines wide with vast Light and makes all things manifest byhis greatness.” What are we to understand? Shall we supposethat the singer released from his bonds, one knows not how, isadmiring tranquilly the great blaze of the sacrificial fire whichwas to have devoured him and wonder at the rapid transitionsof the primitive mind? It is only when we discover that the “vastLight” was a fixed phrase in the language of the Mystics for awide, free and luminous consciousness beyond mind, that weseize the true burden of the Rik. The seer is hymning his releasefrom the triple cord of mind, nerves and body and the uprising ofthe knowledge and will within him to a plane of consciousnesswhere the real truth of all things transcendent of their apparenttruth becomes at length manifest in a vast illumination.

Foreword 367

But how are we to bring home this profound, natural andinner sense to the minds of others in a translation? It cannot bedone unless we translate interpretatively, “O Will, O Priest ofour sacrifice, loose from us the cords of our bondage” and “thisFlame shines out with the vast Light of the Truth and makesall things manifest by its greatness.” The reader will then atleast be able to seize the spiritual nature of the cord, the light,the flame; he will feel something of the sense and spirit of thisancient chant.

The method I have employed will be clear from these in-stances. I have sometimes thrown aside the image, but not soas to demolish the whole structure of the outer symbol or tosubstitute a commentary for a translation. It would have beenan undesirable violence to strip from the richly jewelled garbof the Vedic thought its splendid ornaments or to replace it bya coarse garment of common speech. But I have endeavouredto make it everywhere as transparent as possible. I have ren-dered the significant names of the Gods, Kings, Rishis by theirhalf-concealed significances, — otherwise the mask would haveremained impenetrable; where the image was unessential, I havesometimes sacrificed it for its psychological equivalent; where itinfluenced the colour of the surrounding words, I have soughtfor some phrase which would keep the figure and yet bring outits whole complexity of sense. Sometimes I have even used adouble translation. Thus for the Vedic word which means atonce light or ray and cow, I have given according to the cir-cumstances “Light”, “the radiances”, “the shining herds”, “theradiant kine”, “Light, mother of the herds”. Soma, the ambrosialwine of the Veda, has been rendered “wine of delight” or “wineof immortality”.

The Vedic language as a whole is a powerful and remarkableinstrument, terse, knotted, virile, packed, and in its turns carefulrather to follow the natural flight of the thought in the mindthan to achieve the smooth and careful constructions and theclear transitions of a logical and rhetorical syntax. But trans-lated without modification into English such a language wouldbecome harsh, abrupt and obscure, a dead and heavy movement


with nothing in it of the morning vigour and puissant stride ofthe original. I have therefore preferred to throw it in translationinto a mould more plastic and natural to the English tongue,using the constructions and devices of transition which bestsuit a modern speech while preserving the logic of the originalthought; and I have never hesitated to reject the bald dictionaryequivalent of the Vedic word for an ampler phrase in the Englishwhere that was necessary to bring out the full sense and asso-ciations. Throughout I have kept my eye fixed on my primaryobject — to make the inner sense of the Veda seizable by thecultured intelligence of today.

When all has been done, the aid of some amount of an-notation remained still indispensable; but I have tried not tooverburden the translation with notes or to indulge in over-long explanations. I have excluded everything scholastic. In theVeda there are numbers of words of a doubtful meaning, manylocutions whose sense can only be speculatively or provisionallyfixed, not a few verses capable of two or more different inter-pretations. But a translation of this kind is not the place for anyrecord of the scholar’s difficulties and hesitations. I have alsoprefixed a brief outline of the main Vedic thought indispensableto the reader who wishes to understand.

He will expect only to seize the general trend and surfacesuggestions of the Vedic hymns. More would be hardly pos-sible. To enter into the very heart of the mystic doctrine, wemust ourselves have trod the ancient paths and renewed thelost discipline, the forgotten experience. And which of us canhope to do that with any depth or living power? Who in thisAge of Iron shall have the strength to recover the light of theForefathers or soar above the two enclosing firmaments of mindand body into their luminous empyrean of the infinite Truth?The Rishis sought to conceal their knowledge from the unfit,believing perhaps that the corruption of the best might lead tothe worst and fearing to give the potent wine of the Soma tothe child and the weakling. But whether their spirits still moveamong us looking for the rare Aryan soul in a mortality that iscontent to leave the radiant herds of the Sun for ever imprisoned

Foreword 369

in the darkling cave of the Lords of the sense-life or whether theyawait in their luminous world the hour when the Maruts shallagain drive abroad and the Hound of Heaven shall once againspeed down to us from beyond the rivers of Paradise and theseals of the heavenly waters shall be broken and the cavernsshall be rent and the immortalising wine shall be pressed outin the body of man by the electric thunderstones, their secretremains safe to them. Small is the chance that in an age whichblinds our eyes with the transient glories of the outward life anddeafens our ears with the victorious trumpets of a material andmechanical knowledge many shall cast more than the eye of anintellectual and imaginative curiosity on the passwords of theirancient discipline or seek to penetrate into the heart of theirradiant mysteries. The secret of the Veda, even when it has beenunveiled, remains still a secret.

The Doctrine of the Mystics

THE VEDA possesses the high spiritual substance of theUpanishads, but lacks their phraseology; it is an inspiredknowledge as yet insufficiently equipped with intellec-

tual and philosophical terms. We find a language of poets andilluminates to whom all experience is real, vivid, sensible, evenconcrete, not yet of thinkers and systematisers to whom therealities of the mind and soul have become abstractions. Yet asystem, a doctrine there is; but its structure is supple, its termsare concrete, the cast of its thought is practical and experimental,but in the accomplished type of an old and sure experience, notof one that is crude and uncertain because yet in the making.Here we have the ancient psychological science and the art ofspiritual living of which the Upanishads are the philosophicaloutcome and modification and Vedanta, Sankhya and Yogathe late intellectual result and logical dogma. But like all life,like all science that is still vital, it is free from the armouredrigidities of the reasoning intellect; in spite of its establishedsymbols and sacred formulae it is still large, free, flexible, fluid,supple and subtle. It has the movement of life and the largebreath of the soul. And while the later philosophies are booksof Knowledge and make liberation the one supreme good, theVeda is a Book of Works and the hope for which it spurnsour present bonds and littleness is perfection, self-achievement,immortality.

The doctrine of the Mystics recognises an Unknowable,Timeless and Unnameable behind and above all things and notseizable by the studious pursuit of the mind. Impersonally, itis That, the One Existence; to the pursuit of our personality itreveals itself out of the secrecy of things as the God or Deva, —nameless though he has many names, immeasurable and beyonddescription, though he holds in himself all description of name


and knowledge and all measures of form and substance, forceand activity.

The Deva or Godhead is both the original cause and the finalresult. Divine Existent, builder of the worlds, lord and begetterof all things, Male and Female, Being and Consciousness, Fatherand Mother of the Worlds and their inhabitants, he is also theirSon and ours: for he is the Divine Child born into the Worldswho manifests himself in the growth of the creature. He is Rudraand Vishnu, Prajapati and Hiranyagarbha, Surya, Agni, Indra,Vayu, Soma, Brihaspati, — Varuna and Mitra and Bhaga andAryaman, all the gods. He is the wise, mighty and liberating Sonborn from our works and our sacrifice, the Hero in our warfareand Seer of our knowledge, the White Steed in the front of ourdays who gallops towards the upper Ocean.

The soul of man soars as the Bird, the Hansa, past theshining firmaments of physical and mental consciousness, climbsas the traveller and fighter beyond earth of body and heaven ofmind by the ascending path of the Truth to find this Godheadwaiting for us, leaning down to us from the secrecy of the highestsupreme where it is seated in the triple divine Principle and thesource of the Beatitude. The Deva is indeed, whether attractingand exalted there or here helpful to us in the person of the greaterGods, always the Friend and Lover of man, the pastoral Masterof the Herds who gives us the sweet milk and the clarified butterfrom the udder of the shining Cow of the infinitude. He is thesource and outpourer of the ambrosial Wine of divine delightand we drink it drawn from the sevenfold waters of existenceor pressed out from the luminous plant on the hill of being anduplifted by its raptures we become immortal.

Such are some of the images of this ancient mystic adoration.

The Godhead has built this universe in a complex system ofworlds which we find both within us and without, subjectivelycognised and objectively sensed. It is a rising tier of earths andheavens; it is a stream of diverse waters; it is a Light of sevenrays, or of eight or nine or ten; it is a Hill of many plateaus. Theseers often image it in a series of trios; there are three earths and


three heavens. More, there is a triple world below, — Heaven,Earth and the intervening mid-region; a triple world between,the shining heavens of the Sun; a triple world above, the supremeand rapturous abodes of the Godhead.

But other principles intervene and make the order of theworlds yet more complex. These principles are psychological;for since all creation is a formation of the Spirit, every externalsystem of worlds must in each of its planes be in material cor-respondence with some power or rising degree of consciousnessof which it is the objective symbol and must house a kindredinternal order of things. To understand the Veda we must seizethis Vedic parallelism and distinguish the cosmic gradations towhich it leads. We rediscover the same system behind the laterPuranic symbols and it is thence that we can derive its tabulatedseries most simply and clearly. For there are seven principles ofexistence and the seven Puranic worlds correspond to them withsufficient precision, thus: —

Principle World1. Pure Existence — Sat World of the highest truth of

being (Satyaloka)2. Pure Consciousness — World of infinite Will or con-

Chit scious force (Tapoloka)3. Pure Bliss — Ananda World of creative delight of

existence (Janaloka)4. Knowledge or Truth — World of the Vastness

Vijnana (Maharloka)5. Mind World of light (Swar)6. Life (nervous being) Worlds of various becoming

(Bhuvar)7. Matter The material world (Bhur)

Now this system which in the Purana is simple enough, isa good deal more intricate in the Veda. There the three highestworlds are classed together as the triple divine Principle, — forthey dwell always together in a Trinity; infinity is their scope,bliss is their foundation. They are supported by the vast regions


of the Truth whence a divine Light radiates out towards ourmentality in the three heavenly luminous worlds of Swar, thedomain of Indra. Below is ranked the triple system in which welive.

We have the same cosmic gradations as in the Puranas butthey are differently grouped, — seven worlds in principle, five inpractice, three in their general groupings:

1. The Supreme Sat-Chit-Ananda The triple divine worlds

2. The Link-WorldSupermind The Truth, Right, Vast,

manifested in Swar, withits three luminous heavens

3. The triple lower worldPure Mind Heaven (Dyaus, the three heavens)Life-force The Mid-Region (Antariksha)Matter Earth (the three earths)

And as each principle can be modified by the subordinatemanifestation of the others within it, each world is divisibleinto several provinces according to different arrangements andself-orderings of its creative light of consciousness. Into thisframework, then, we must place all the complexities of the subtlevision and fertile imagery of the seers down to the hundred citieswhich are now in the possession of the hostile kings, the Lordsof division and evil. But the gods shall break them open and givethem for his free possession to the Aryan worshipper!

But where are these worlds and whence are they created?Here we have one of the profoundest ideas of the Vedic sages.Man dwells in the bosom of the Earth-Mother and is awareof this world of mortality only; but there is a superconscienthigh beyond where the divine worlds are seated in a luminoussecrecy; there is a subconscient or inconscient below his surfacewaking impressions and from that pregnant Night the worldsas he sees them are born. And these other worlds between theluminous upper and the tenebrous lower ocean? They are here.


Man draws from the life-world his vital being, from the mind-world his mentality; he is ever in secret communication withthem; he can consciously enter into them, be born into them,if he will. Even into the solar worlds of the Truth he can rise,enter the portals of the Superconscient, cross the threshold ofthe Supreme. The divine doors shall swing open to his increasingsoul.

This human ascension is possible because every being reallyholds in himself all that his outward vision perceives as if ex-ternal to him. We have subjective faculties hidden in us whichcorrespond to all the tiers and strata of the objective cosmicsystem and these form for us so many planes of our possibleexistence. This material life and our narrowly limited conscious-ness of the physical world are far from being the sole experiencepermitted to man, — be he a thousand times the Son of Earth.If maternal Earth bore him and retains him in her arms, yet isHeaven also one of his parents and has a claim on his being. It isopen to him to become awake to profounder depths and higherheights within and such awakening is his intended progress. Andas he mounts thus to higher and ever higher planes of himself,new worlds open to his life and his vision and become the field ofhis experience and the home of his spirit. He lives in contact andunion with their powers and godheads and remoulds himselfin their image. Each ascent is thus a new birth of the soul,and the Veda calls the worlds “births” as well as seats anddwelling-places.

For as the Gods have built the series of the cosmic worlds,even so they labour to build up the same series of ordered statesand ascending degrees in man’s consciousness from the mortalcondition to the crowning immortality. They raise him from thelimited material state of being in which our lowest manhooddwells contented and subject to the Lords of Division, give hima life rich and abundant with the many and rapid shocks andimpulsions from the dynamic worlds of Life and Desire wherethe Gods battle with the demons and raise him yet higher fromthose troubled rapidities and intensities into the steadfast purityand clarity of the high mental existence. For pure thought and


feeling are man’s sky, his heaven; this whole vitalistic existence ofemotion, passions, affections of which desire is the pivot, formsfor him a mid-world; body and material living are his earth.

But pure thought and pure psychic state are not the highestheight of the human ascension. The home of the Gods is anabsolute Truth which lives in solar glories beyond mind. Man as-cending thither strives no longer as the thinker but is victoriouslythe seer; he is no longer this mental creature but a divine being.His will, life, thought, emotion, sense, act are all transformedinto values of an all-puissant Truth and remain no longer anembarrassed or a helpless tangle of mixed truth and falsehood.He moves lamely no more in our narrow and grudging limitsbut ranges in the unobstructed Vast; toils and zigzags no longeramid these crookednesses, but follows a swift and conqueringstraightness; feeds no longer on broken fragments, but is suckledby the teats of Infinity. Therefore he has to break through andout beyond these firmaments of earth and heaven; conqueringfirm possession of the solar worlds, entering on to his highestHeight he has to learn how to dwell in the triple principle ofImmortality.

This contrast of the mortality we are and the immortal con-dition to which we can aspire is the key of the Vedic thought andpractice. Veda is the earliest gospel we have of man’s immortalityand these ancient stanzas conceal the primitive discipline of itsinspired discoverers.

Substance of being, light of consciousness, active force andpossessive delight are the constituent principles of existence; buttheir combination in us may be either limited, divided, hurt,broken and obscure or infinite, enlightened, vast, whole and un-hurt. Limited and divided being is ignorance; it is darkness andweakness, it is grief and pain; in the Vast, in the integral, in theinfinite we must seek for the desirable riches of substance, light,force and joy. Limitation is mortality; immortality comes to usas an accomplished self-possession in the infinite and the powerto live and move in firm vastnesses. Therefore it is in proportionas he widens and on condition that he increases constantly in


substance of his being, brightens an ever loftier flame of willand vaster light of knowledge, advances the boundaries of hisconsciousness, raises the degrees and enlarges the breadth ofhis power, force and strength, confirms an intenser beatitudeof joy and liberates his soul into immeasurable peace that manbecomes capable of immortality.

To widen is to acquire new births. The aspiring materialcreature becomes the straining vital man; he in turn transmuteshimself into the subtle mental and psychical being; this subtlethinker grows into the wide, multiple and cosmic man open onall sides of him to all the multitudinous inflowings of the Truth;the cosmic soul rising in attainment strives as the spiritual manfor a higher peace, joy and harmony. These are the five Aryantypes, each of them a great people occupying its own provinceor state of the total human nature. But there is also the absoluteAryan who would conquer and pass beyond these states to thetranscendental harmony of them all.

It is the supramental Truth that is the instrument of thisgreat inner transfiguration. That replaces mentality by luminousvision and the eye of the gods, mortal life by breath and forceof the infinite existence, obscure and death-possessed substanceby the free and immortal conscious-being. The progress of manmust be therefore, first, his self-expanding into a puissant vitalitycapable of sustaining all vibrations of action and experience anda clear mental and psychical purity; secondly, an outgrowing ofthis human light and power and its transmutation into an infiniteTruth and an immortal Will.

Our normal life and consciousness are a dark or at besta starlit Night. Dawn comes by the arising of the Sun of thathigher Truth and with Dawn there comes the effective sacrifice.By the sacrifice the Dawn itself and the lost Sun are constantlyconquered out of the returning Night and the luminous herdsrescued from the darkling cave of the Panis; by the sacrificethe rain of the abundance of heaven is poured out for us andthe sevenfold waters of the higher existence descend impetuouslyupon our earth because the coils of the obscuring Python, the all-enfolding and all-withholding Vritra, have been cloven asunder


by the God-Mind’s flashing lightnings; in the sacrifice the Somawine is distilled and uplifts us on the stream of its immortalisingecstasy to the highest heavens.

Our sacrifice is the offering of all our gains and works tothe powers of the higher existence. The whole world is a dumband helpless sacrifice in which the soul is bound as a victim self-offered to unseen Gods. The liberating Word must be found,the illuminating hymn must be framed in the heart and mind ofman and his life must be turned into a conscious and voluntaryoffering in which the soul is no longer the victim, but the masterof the sacrifice. By right sacrifice and by the all-creative and all-expressive Word that shall arise out of his depths as a sublimehymn to the Gods man can achieve all things. He shall conquerhis perfection; Nature shall come to him as a willing and longingbride; he shall become her seer and rule her as her King.

By the hymn of prayer and God-attraction, by the hymnof praise and God-affirmation, by the hymn of God-attainmentand self-expression man can house in himself the Gods, buildin this gated house of his being the living image of their deity,grow into divine births, form within himself vast and luminousworlds for his soul to inhabit. By the word of the Truth theall-engendering Surya creates; by that rhythm Brahmanaspatievokes the worlds and Twashtri fashions them; finding the all-puissant Word in his intuitive heart, shaping it in his mind thehuman thinker, the mortal creature can create in himself all theforms, all the states and conditions he desires and, achieving,can conquer for himself all wealth of being, light, strength andenjoyment. He builds up his integral being and aids his godsto destroy the evil armies; the hosts of his spiritual enemies areslain who have divided, torn and afflicted his nature.

The image of this sacrifice is sometimes that of a journeyor voyage; for it travels, it ascends; it has a goal — the vastness,the true existence, the light, the felicity — and it is called uponto discover and keep the good, the straight and the happy pathto the goal, the arduous, yet joyful road of the Truth. It hasto climb, led by the flaming strength of the divine Will, from


plateau to plateau as of a mountain, it has to cross as in a shipthe waters of existence, traverse its rivers, overcome their deeppits and rapid currents; its aim is to arrive at the far-off oceanof light and infinity.

And this is no easy or peaceful march; it is for long seasonsa fierce and relentless battle. Constantly the Aryan man has tolabour and to fight and conquer; he must be a tireless toiler andtraveller and a stern warrior, he must force open and storm andsack city after city, win kingdom after kingdom, overthrow andtread down ruthlessly enemy after enemy. His whole progress isa warring of Gods and Titans, Gods and Giants, Indra and thePython, Aryan and Dasyu. Aryan adversaries even he has to facein the open field; for old friends and helpers turn into enemies;the kings of Aryan states he would conquer and overpass jointhemselves to the Dasyus and are leagued against him in supremebattle to prevent his free and utter passing on.

But the Dasyu is the natural enemy. These dividers, plun-derers, harmful powers, these Danavas, sons of the Mother ofdivision, are spoken of by the Rishis under many general appel-lations. There are Rakshasas; there are Eaters and Devourers,Wolves and Tearers; there are hurters and haters; there are dual-isers; there are confiners or censurers. But we are given also manyspecific names. Vritra, the Serpent, is the grand Adversary; forhe obstructs with his coils of darkness all possibility of divineexistence and divine action. And even when Vritra is slain bythe light, fiercer enemies arise out of him. Shushna afflicts uswith his impure and ineffective force, Namuchi fights man byhis weaknesses, and others too assail, each with his properevil. Then there are Vala and the Panis, miser traffickers inthe sense-life, stealers and concealers of the higher Light andits illuminations which they can only darken and misuse, —an impious host who are jealous of their store and will notoffer sacrifice to the Gods. These and other personalities — theyare much more than personifications — of our ignorance, evil,weakness and many limitations make constant war upon man;they encircle him from near or they shoot their arrows at himfrom afar or even dwell in his gated house in the place of the


Gods and with their shapeless stammering mouths and theirinsufficient breath of force mar his self-expression. They mustbe expelled, overpowered, slain, thrust down into their netherdarkness by the aid of the mighty and helpful deities.

The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the uni-versal Godhead and they represent each some essential puissanceof the Divine Being. They manifest the cosmos and are manifestin it. Children of Light, Sons of the Infinite, they recognise inthe soul of man their brother and ally and desire to help andincrease him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess hisworld with their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call manto a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplifthim to their luminous fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirsagainst the Sons of Darkness and Division. Man in return callsthe Gods to his sacrifice, offers to them his swiftnesses and hisstrengths, his clarities and his sweetnesses, — milk and butter ofthe shining Cow, distilled juices of the Plant of Joy, the Horseof the Sacrifice, the cake and the wine, the grain for the God-Mind’s radiant coursers. He receives them into his being andtheir gifts into his life, increases them by the hymn and the wineand forms perfectly — as a smith forges iron, says the Veda —their great and luminous godheads.

All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once wehave the key, but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. TheGods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideasor of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To theVedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the humansoul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles andtendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embodythem. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stageand in the individual soul the same real drama with the samepersonages is enacted.

To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be in-voked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasinggodhead?

Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn


on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tonguedpower of the Will, a Force of God instinct with knowledge. Thisconscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality,a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earthand heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers andbrings back in return their force and light and joy into ourhumanity.

Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existenceself-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Forceinstinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earthto heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with forcewhich descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into ourworld as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness anddivision with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenlywaters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost orhidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in theheaven of our mentality.

Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, — truthof being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and move-ment and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather themanifester of all things — for creation is outbringing, expressionby the Truth and Will — and the father, fosterer, enlightener ofour souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sunwho comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases andreveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highestBeatitude.

Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wineof his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters ofexistence; even here in our physical being are his immortalisingjuices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods;for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.

Each of these primary deities has others associated withhim who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if thetruth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature,there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vastpurity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crookedfalsehood, — and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love


and comprehension leading and forming into harmony allour thoughts, acts and impulses, — this is Mitra; an immortalpuissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, — thisis Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of allthings dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering,— this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya.

For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly inour nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed conditionof mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is givento us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light,drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers ofmaim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and partsof action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being foran easy and victorious ascension.

Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms hasfor his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers whoby the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the highdwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and helpmankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mindIndra’s horses, the Ashwins’ chariot, the weapons of the Gods,all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of theLight of truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts,who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that haveattained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression.They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers andthey battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supremeConsciousness.

There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male andFemale and the gods also are either activising souls or passivelyexecutive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of thegods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truth-consciousness, — Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that bringsus all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primalword of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati,its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama,the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavernof the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations;


Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the actionand the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godheadits portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.

All this action and struggle and ascension is supported byHeaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods,who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic andthe physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is thecondition of our achievement. Vayu, Master of life, links themtogether by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there areother deities, — Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikra-van, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon ofthe Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existenceconsummates our triple being; and more besides.

The development of all these godheads is necessary to ourperfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels,— in the wideness of earth, our physical being and conscious-ness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment andnervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be broughtforward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of theheart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mindthroughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the comingof the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shiningMother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comesto us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirablesurge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolutebeing.

Three great Gods, origin of the Puranic Trinity, largestpuissances of the supreme Godhead, make possible this devel-opment and upward evolution; they support in its grand linesand fundamental energies all these complexities of the cosmos.Brahmanaspati is the Creator; by the word, by his cry he cre-ates, — that is to say, he expresses, he brings out all existenceand conscious knowledge and movement of life and eventualforms from the darkness of the Inconscient. Rudra, the Violentand Merciful, the Mighty One, presides over the struggle oflife to affirm itself; he is the armed, wrathful and beneficentPower of God who lifts forcibly the creation upward, smites all


that opposes, scourges all that errs and resists, heals all that iswounded and suffers and complains and submits. Vishnu of thevast pervading motion holds in his triple stride all these worlds;it is he that makes a wide room for the action of Indra in ourlimited mortality; it is by him and with him that we rise intohis highest seats where we find waiting for us the Friend, theBeloved, the Beatific Godhead.

Our earth shaped out of the dark inconscient ocean of exis-tence lifts its high formations and ascending peaks heavenward;heaven of mind has its own formations, clouds that give outtheir lightnings and their waters of life; the streams of the clarityand the honey ascend out of the subconscient ocean below andseek the superconscient ocean above; and from above that oceansends downward its rivers of the light and truth and bliss eveninto our physical being. Thus in images of physical Nature theVedic poets sing the hymn of our spiritual ascension.

That ascension has already been effected by the Ancients, thehuman forefathers, and the spirits of these great Ancestors stillassist their offspring; for the new dawns repeat the old and leanforward in light to join the dawns of the future. Kanwa, Kutsa,Atri, Kakshiwan, Gotama, Shunahshepa have become types ofcertain spiritual victories which tend to be constantly repeatedin the experience of humanity. The seven sages, the Angirasas,are waiting still and always, ready to chant the word, to rend thecavern, to find the lost herds, to recover the hidden Sun. Thusthe soul is a battlefield full of helpers and hurters, friends andenemies. All this lives, teems, is personal, is conscious, is active.We create for ourselves by the sacrifice and by the word shiningseers, heroes to fight for us, children of our works. The Rishisand the Gods find for us our luminous herds; the Ribhus fashionby the mind the chariots of the gods and their horses and theirshining weapons. Our life is a horse that neighing and gallopingbears us onward and upward; its forces are swift-hooved steeds,the liberated powers of the mind are wide-winging birds; thismental being or this soul is the upsoaring Swan or the Falconthat breaks out from a hundred iron walls and wrests from thejealous guardians of felicity the wine of the Soma. Every shining


godward Thought that arises from the secret abysses of the heartis a priest and a creator and chants a divine hymn of luminousrealisation and puissant fulfilment. We seek for the shining goldof the Truth; we lust after a heavenly treasure.

The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom inwhich armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, ahouse where the gods are our guests and which the demonsstrive to possess; the fullness of its energies and wideness of itsbeing make a seat of sacrifice spread, arranged and purified fora celestial session.

Such are some of the principal images of the Veda and a verybrief and insufficient outline of the teaching of the Forefathers.So understood the Rig Veda ceases to be an obscure, confusedand barbarous hymnal; it becomes the high-aspiring Song ofHumanity; its chants are episodes of the lyrical epic of the soulin its immortal ascension.

This at least; what more there may be in the Veda of ancientscience, lost knowledge, old psycho-physical tradition remainsyet to be discovered.

Hymns to Agni

Agni, the Divine Will-Force

THE NAME of this flaming godhead, Agni, derives froma root whose quality of significance is a preeminent forceor intensity whether in state, action, sensation or move-

ment; but the qualities of this essential significance vary. Itmeans a burning brightness, whence its use for fire; it meansmovement and especially a curving or serpentine movement; itmeans strength and force, beauty and splendour, leading andpreeminence; it developed also certain emotional values whichhave perished in Sanskrit, but remain in Greek, angry passionon one side, on the other delight and love.

The Vedic deity Agni is the first of the Powers, the pris-tine and preeminent, that have issued from the vast and secretGodhead. By conscious force of the Godhead the worlds havebeen created and are governed from within by that hidden andinner Control; Agni is the form, the fire, the forceful heat andflaming will of this Divinity. As a flaming Force of knowledgehe descends to build up the worlds and seated within them, asecret deity, initiates movement and action. This divine Con-scious Force contains all the other godheads in itself as the naveof a wheel contains its spokes. All puissance of action, strengthin the being, beauty of form, splendour of light and knowledge,glory and greatness are the manifestation of Agni. And whenhe is entirely delivered and fulfilled out of the envelope of theworld’s crookednesses, this deity of flame and force is revealedas the solar godhead of love and harmony and light, Mitra, wholeads men towards the Truth.

But in the Vedic cosmos Agni appears first as a front of divineForce compact of burning heat and light which forms, assails,enters into, envelops, devours, rebuilds all things in Matter. Heis no random fire; his is a flame of force instinct with the light ofdivine knowledge. Agni is the seer-will in the universe unerring


in all its works. Whatever he does in his passion and power isguided by the light of the silent Truth within him. He is a truth-conscious soul, a seer, a priest and a worker, — the immortalworker in man. His mission is to purify all that he works uponand to raise up the soul struggling in Nature from obscurity tothe light, from the strife and the suffering to love and joy, fromthe heat and the labour to the peace and the bliss. He is, then,the Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Deva; secret inhabitantof Matter and its forms, visible and beloved guest of man, it ishe that guards the law of the Truth of things in the apparentaberrations and confusions of the world. The other gods awakewith the Dawn, but Agni wakes also in the Night; he keeps hisdivine vision even in the darkness where there is neither moonnor star; the flame of the divine will and knowledge is visibleeven in the densest obscurity of inconscient or half-conscientthings. The infallible worker is there even when we see nowherethe conscious light of the guiding mind.

No sacrifice is possible without Agni. He is at once the flameon the altar and the priest of the oblation. When man, awakenedfrom his night, wills to offer his inner and outer activities tothe gods of a truer and higher existence and so to arise out ofmortality into the far-off immortality, his goal and his desire,it is this flame of upward aspiring Force and Will that he mustkindle; into this fire he must cast the sacrifice. For it is this thatoffers to the gods and brings down in return all spiritual riches,— the divine waters, the light, the strength, the rain of heaven.This calls, this carries the gods to the house of the sacrifice. Agniis the priest man puts in front as his spiritual representative(purohita), a Will, a Force greater, higher, more infallible thanhis own doing for him the works of the sacrifice, purifying thematerials of the oblation, offering them to the gods whom ithas summoned to the divine ritual, determining the right orderand season of its works, conducting the progress, the march ofthe sacrificial development. These and other various functionsof the symbolic priesthood, represented in the outward sacrificeby different officiating priests, are discharged by the single Agni.

Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great

Agni, the Divine Will-Force 389

journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge andpurpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he isthe friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evilgods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped bythe darkness of the human ignorance, this flame is a light which,when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higherand higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flamingupward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through thevital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies andenters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home abovewhere joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundationof the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestialsessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.

It is true that here the light is concealed. Agni, like othergods, figures here as a child of the universal parents, Heavenand Earth, Mind and Body, Soul and material Nature. This earthholds him concealed in her own materiality and does not releasehim for the conscious works of the Father. She hides him inall her growths, her plants, herbs, trees — the forms full of herheats, the objects that keep for the soul its delights. But at lastshe shall yield him up; she is the lower tinder, the mental beingis the upper tinder; by the pressure of the upper on the lower theflame of Agni shall be born. But it is by pressure, by a sort ofchurning that he is born. Therefore he is called the Son of Force.

Even when Agni emerges, he is outwardly obscure in hisworkings. He becomes, first, not a pure Will, though really heis always pure, but a vital Will, the desire of the Life in us, asmoke-obscured flame, son of our crookednesses, a Beast grazingin its pasture, a force of devouring desire that feeds upon earth’sgrowths, tears and ravages all upon which it feeds and leaves ablack and charred line to mark its path where there was the joyand glory of earth’s woodlands. But in all this there is a work ofpurification, which becomes conscious for the man of sacrifice.Agni destroys and purifies. His very hunger and desire, infinite inits scope, prepares the establishment of a higher universal order.The smoke of his passion is overcome and this vital Will, thisburning desire in the Life becomes the Steed that carries us up


to the highest levels, — the white Steed that gallops in the frontof the Dawns.

Delivered from his smoke-enveloped activity he burns highin our skies, scales the ether of the pure mind and mounts uponthe back of heaven. There on that rarer level its god Trita Aptyatakes this high-flaming force and forges it into a weapon ofsharpness that shall destroy all evil and ignorance. This Seer-Will becomes the guardian of the illuminations of knowledge —herds of the Sun that graze in the pastures of life secure from theSons of division and darkness, protected by the warrior force ofthe Will that knows. He attains the immortality and maintainsunhurt its law of truth and joy in the human creature. In the endwe overpass all crookednesses of falsehood and error, emergefrom the low and broken and devious ground to the straightpath and the high and open levels. Will and Knowledge becomeone; every impulse of the perfected soul becomes conscious ofthe essential truth of its own self-being, every act fulfils it con-sciently, joyously, victoriously. Such is the godhead to which theVedic Fire exalts the Aryan who does the sacrifice. The Immortalconquers in the mortal and by his sacrifice. Man, the thinker,fighter, toiler, becomes a seer, self-ruler and king over Nature.

The Veda speaks of this divine Flame in a series of splendidand opulent images. He is the rapturous priest of the sacrifice,the God-Will intoxicated with its own delight, the young sage,the sleepless envoy, the ever-wakeful flame in the house, themaster of our gated dwelling-place, the beloved guest, the lordin the creature, the seer of the flaming tresses, the divine child,the pure and virgin God, the invincible warrior, the leader on thepath who marches in front of the human peoples, the immortalin mortals, the worker established in man by the gods, the unob-structed in knowledge, the infinite in being, the vast and flamingsun of the Truth, the sustainer of the sacrifice and discerner of itssteps, the divine perception, the light, the vision, the firm foun-dation. Throughout the Veda it is in the hymns which celebratethis strong and brilliant deity that we find those which are themost splendid in poetic colouring, profound in psychologicalsuggestion and sublime in their mystic intoxication. It is as if his

Agni, the Divine Will-Force 391

own flame and cry and light had seized with a burning ecstasyon the imagination of his poets.

Amid this crowd of poetical images there are some of asymbolic character which describe the many births of the divineFlame. They are recounted with an extraordinary variety. Some-times he is the child of Heaven, the Father — Mind or Soul— and of Earth the Mother — Body or material Nature; some-times he is the flame born from these two tinders; sometimesHeaven and Earth are called his two mothers, when the figureis more explicitly symbolic of the pure mental and psychicaland the physical consciousness. He is also hymned as the childof the seven Mothers — for his complete birth is a result of themanifestation of seven principles which constitute our consciousexistence — three spiritual of the infinite, three temporal of thefinite, and one intermediate — and which are, respectively, thefoundation of the seven worlds. Like other gods, he is said tobe born of the Truth; the Truth is at once his birthplace andhis home. Sometimes it is said that the Seven Beloved broughthim into birth for the Lord; and here the symbol seems to carryback his source to that other principle of pure Bliss which is theoriginal cause of creation. He has one form of the solar light andflame, another heavenly in the mind, a third which dwells in therivers. Night and Dawn are delivered of him, the Knowledge andthe Ignorance suckle alternately the divine Child in their succes-sive occupation of our heavens. And yet again it is Matarishwan,Master of Life, who has planted him for the gods secret in thegrowths of earth, secret in her creatures, man, animal and plant,secret in the mighty Waters. These Waters are the seven rivers ofthe luminous world that descend from heaven when Indra, theGod-Mind, has slain the enveloping Python; they descend full ofthe light and the heavenly abundance, instinct with the clarityand the sweetness, the sweet milk and the butter and the honey.Agni’s birth here from these fostering Cows, these Mothers ofPlenty, is the greatest of his terrestrial births; fostered by them asthe swift Mares of Life he grows at once to his divine greatness,fills all the planes with his vast and shining limbs and forms theirkingdoms in the soul of man into the image of a divine Truth.


The variety and flexible use of these images — they aresometimes employed in a rapid succession in the same hymn —belongs to a period of conscious symbolism in which the imagehas not hardened and crystallised into the myth but is constantlya figure and a parable whose sense still lives and is still plasticin the originating imagination.

The actual legends about Agni, the developed parables asdistinct from the less elaborate figure, are rare or non-existent —in remarkable contrast with the wealth of myth which crowdsabout the names of Indra and the Ashwins. He participates in thelegendary actions of Indra, the Python-slaying, the recovery ofthe herds, the slaying of the Dasyus; his own activity is universalbut in spite of his supreme greatness or perhaps because of ithe seeks no separate end and claims no primacy over the othergods. He is content to be a worker for man and the helpfuldeities. He is the doer of the great Aryan work and the pureand sublime mediator between earth and heaven. Disinterested,sleepless, invincible this divine Will-force works in the world as auniversal Soul of power housed in all beings, Agni Vaishwanara,the greatest, most powerful, most brilliant and most impersonalof all the cosmic Deities.

The name, Agni, is translated here Power, Strength, Will,the God-will, or the Flame according to the context. The namesof the Rishis are also given, wherever necessary, their significantvalue, as in the first hymn Gavisthira which means the Steadfastin the Light or the general name Atri. Atri means either theEater or the Traveller; Agni himself is the Atri as he is also theAngiras; out of a devouring desire, experience and enjoyment ofthe forms of the world he advances to the liberated truth anddelight of the soul in the possession of its infinite existence.

The First Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE MORNING SACRIFICE

[The Rishi hymns the awakening of Agni the Divine Force toconscious action in the coming of the Dawn. Agni rises towardsthe luminous Paradise, his goal, feeding on the works of theDiscernment which distributes the gifts and activities of the sac-rifice, becomes a pure energy leading our days and ascends tothe Vastness and the Truth. By the Truth he fashions anew ourtwo firmaments, the physical and mental consciousness. This isthe golden Affirmation of him in our heavens.]

abo2yE�n� sEmDA jnAnA� Et D�n� EmvAytFm� qAsm� yh� vA iv vyAm� E?jhAnA� BAnv� Es5t� nAkmQC � ��

1. Strength is awake by kindling of the peoples and he frontsthe Dawn that comes to him as the Cow that fosters; likemightinesses that rush upward to their expanding his lustresadvancing mount towards the heavenly level.

aboED hotA yjTAy d�vAn� 2vo' aE�n� s� mnA� Atr�TAt� sEmd� D�y zfddEf' pAjo mhAn� d�v�tmso EnrmoEc � ��

2. The Priest of our oblation has awakened for sacrifice to thegods; with right mentality in him Strength stands up exaltedin our mornings; he is entirely kindled, red-flushing the massof him is seen; a great godhead has been delivered out of thedarkness.

ydF� gZ�y rfnAmjFg� f� Ecr]� f� EcEBgo'EBrE�n� aAd� dE0ZA y� ?yt� vAjy�y� �AnAm� 2vo' aDy?j� h� EB� � ��


3. When he has uncoiled the long cord of his hosts, Strengthshines pure by the pure herd of the radiances.1 For the god-dess who discerns grows in plenitude and is yoked to herworks; he exalted, she extended supine, he feeds on her withhis flames of the offering.

aE�nmQCA d�vytA� mnA�Es c0��qFv s� y�' s� crEt ydF� s� vAt� uqsA Ev#p� �v�to vAjF jAyt� ag�� a^Am� � ��

4. The minds of men who grow in the godhead move entirelytowards the flame of Will even as all their seeings convergein the Sun that illumines.2 When two Dawns3 of oppositeforms are delivered of him, he is born as the White Steed infront of the days.

jEn�V Eh j�yo ag�� a^A� Ehto Eht��vzqo vn�q� dm�dm� sJ r$A dDAno�E�nho'tA En qsAdA yjFyAn� � "�

5. Yea, he is born victorious in the front of the days, a ruddyworker established in the established delights of things; up-holding in house after house the seven ecstasies4 Strengthhas taken his seat as the Priest of the offering mighty forsacrifice.

aE�nho'tA ysFdd� yjFyAn� p�T� mAt� � s� rBA u lok� y� vA kEv� p� zEn��W !tAvA DtA' k� �VFnAm� t m2y id� D� � (�

1 The Cows of the Dawn. Dakshina, the goddess of divine discernment, is here a formof the Dawn herself.2 That is to say, instead of the groping thoughts of other men, their mentality tends

to convert itself into a luminous flame of Will that is knowledge and all their thoughtsbecome a blaze of direct vision, the rays of the Sun of Truth.3 Day and Night, — the latter the state of Ignorance that belongs to our material

Nature, the former the state of illumined Knowledge that belongs to the divine Mind ofwhich our mentality is a pale and dulled reflection.4 To each principle of our nature there corresponds a certain divine ecstasy and on

each plane, in each body or house, Agni establishes these ecstasies.

Hymns to Agni 395

6. Strength has taken his seat as the Priest of the offeringmighty for sacrifice in the lap of the Mother and in thatrapturous other world,5 young and a seer, standing out inhis multitudes, possessed of the Truth, the upholder of thosethat do the work; and also in between he is kindled.

Z� �y� Ev m2vr�q� sAD� mE�n� hotArmF1t� nmoEB� aA y�ttAn rodsF !t�n En�y� m� jEt vAEjn� G� t�n � *�

7. Men seek with their obeisances of submission this illuminedStrength that achieves our perfection in the progressing sac-rifices and is the priest of their oblation, because he shapesin the power of the Truth both firmaments of our being.Him they press into brightness by the clarity,6 the eternalsteed of life’s plenitude.

mAjA'Syo m� ?yt� �v� dm� nA� kEv f�to aEtET� Efvo n� sh5f� Yo v� qB�tdojA Ev�vA& a�n� shsA A�yyAn� � ,�

8. Bright, he is rubbed bright, expressed by the seer, domiciledin his own home7 and our beneficent guest. The bull of thethousand horns, because thou hast that force,8 O Strength,thou precedest in thy puissance all others.

s%o a�n� a�y��yyAnAEvy'�m� cAztmo bB� T I1�yo vp� �yo EvBAvA E yo EvfAmEtETmA'n� qFZAm� � -�

9. At once, O Strength, thou outstrippest all others, in whom-soever thou art manifested in all the glory of thy beauty,

5 The mother is Earth, our physical being; the other world is the supramental existence;the vital and emotional being is the world in between. Agni manifests in all of thesesimultaneously.6 The clarified butter, yield of the Cow of Light and symbol of the rich clarity that

comes to the mind visited by the Light.7 That is to say, having taken his place on the plane of the Truth which is his own

proper home.8 The force of the Truth, the perfect energy that belongs to this perfect knowledge.


desirable, full of body, extended in light, the beloved guestof the human peoples.

t� �y� BrEt E0tyo yEv�W bElm�n� aEtt aot d� rAt� aA BEd�W�y s� mEt� EcEkEd� D b� ht� t� a�n� mEh fm' Bd� m� � �.�

10. To thee, O Strength, O youngest vigour, all the worlds andtheir peoples bring from near and bring from afar their offer-ing. Awake in a man’s knowledge to that right-mindednessof his happiest state. A vastness, O Strength, is the great andblissful peace of thee.

aA% rT� BAn� mo BAn� mtm�n� Et�W yjt�EB� smtm� Ev�An� pTFnAm� v'tEr0m�h d�vAn� hEvr%Ay vE0 � ��

11. Mount today with the lords of the sacrifice, O luminousWill, thy luminous complete car! Thou who knowest thewide middle world9 in all its paths, bring hither the gods toeat of our oblation.

avocAm kvy� m�2yAy vco vdAz v� qBAy v� �Z� gEvE�Wro nmsA �tomm�nO EdvFv z_m� z4y`m)�t� � ��

12. To the Seer, to the Intelligence we have uttered today theword of our adoration, to the Bull that fertilises the herds;the Steadfast in the Light by his surrender rises in the flameof Will as in the heavens to a golden Affirmation manifestinga vastness.

9 The vital or nervous plane is just above our material earth; through it the gods cometo commune with man, but it is a confused wideness and its paths are many but intricateand tangled.

The Second Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE LIBERATION OF THE DIVINE FORCE

[Nature in her ordinary limited and material workings holds theDivine Force concealed in her secret or subconscient being; onlywhen consciousness enlarges itself towards the One and Infinite,is it manifested, born for the conscient Mind. The clarities ofthe higher illumination cannot be kept so long as there is notthis Strength to guard them, for hostile powers snatch themaway and conceal them again in their secret cavern. Divine Willmanifested in man, itself liberated, liberates him from the cordswhich bind him as a victim in the world-sacrifice; we attain toit by the teaching of Indra, the divine Mind, and it protectsthe uninterrupted play of the Light and destroys the powersof falsehood whose limitations cannot hem in its growth andits out-flaming; it brings the divine waters from the luminousHeaven, the divine wealth liberated from the attacks of theEnemy, and gives the final peace and perfection.]

k� mAr� mAtA y� vEt� sm� ND� g� hA EbBEt' n ddAEt Ep�� anFkm�y n Emn?jnAs� p� r� p�yEt EnEhtmrtO � ��

1. The young Mother1 bears the Boy pressed down in her secretbeing and gives him not to the Father; but his force is notdiminished, the peoples behold him established in front2 inthe upward working of things.

km�t� �v� y� vt� k� mAr� p�qF EbBEq' mEhqF jjAn p� vF'Eh' gB'� frdo vvDA'�p�y� jAt� yds� t mAtA � ��

1 The Mother and Father are always either Nature and the Soul or the material beingand the pure mental being.2 As the Purohit who leads and conducts the work of the sacrifice.


2. Who is this Boy whom thou bearest in thyself when thouart compressed into form, but thy vastness gives him birth?For many seasons the Child grew in the womb; I saw himborn when the Mother brought him forth.

Ehr ydt� f� EcvZ'mArAt� 0��Adp�ymAy� DA EmmAnm� ddAno a�mA am� t� Evp� /vt� Ek� mAmEnd� A� k� Zv�n� /TA� � ��

3. I saw far off in the field of being one tusked with goldenlight and pure bright of hue who was shaping the weaponsof his war. I give to him the immortality in me in all myseparate parts3 and what shall they do to me who have notthe Word4 and the God-Mind is not in them?

0��Adp�y� sn� t�crt� s� md� y� T� n p� z foBmAnm� n tA ag� B��jEn�V Eh q� pElwFErd� y� vtyo BvEt � ��

4. I saw in the field as though a happy herd that ranged contin-uously in many forms of luminous beauty. None could seizeon them, for he was born; even they that were old amongthem, grow young once more.

k� m� my'k� Ev yvt goEBn' y�qA� gopA arZE�cdAs y x jg� B� rv t� s� j�vAjAEt p�v up nE�cEk�vAn� � "�

5. Who were they that divorced my strength from the herds ofLight? Against them there was no protector nor any workerin this war. Let those that took them from me, release themto me again; for he with his conscious perceptions comesdriving to us our lost herds of the radiance.

vsA� rAjAn� vsEt� jnAnAmrAtyo En dD� m'�y�'q� b�LA y��rv t� s� jt� EnEdtAro En%Aso Bvt� � (�

3 Soma, the wine of immortality, is given to the gods in three parts, on three levels ofour being, the mind, life and body.4 The expressive Word which manifests that which is hidden, brings out into expression

that which is unexpressed.

Hymns to Agni 399

6. The king of those who dwell in creatures, he in whom allcreatures dwell, is hidden within mortals by hostile powers;let the soul-thoughts of the Eater of things release him, letthe confiners be themselves confined.

f� nE�cQC�p� EnEdt� sh5Ad� y� pAdm� `o afEm�V Eh q� evA�md�n� Ev m� m� E�D pAfAn� hotE�cEk�v ih t� Enq% � *�

7. Shunahshepa too, head of delight, was bound to the thou-sandfold post of the sacrifice; him thou didst release, —yea, he accomplished perfection by his works; so do thoutake thy seat here in us, O conscious seeing Flame, OPriest of our sacrifice, and loose from us the cords of ourbondage.

3ZFymAno ap Eh md�y�� m� d�vAnA� v�tpA uvAc id� o Ev�A& an� Eh �vA cc0 t�nAhm�n� an� Ef�V aAgAm� � ,�

8. Mayst thou not grow wroth and depart from me! He whoguards the law of action of the godheads, told me of theeand, taught by him his knowledge, I came to thee.

Ev ?yoEtqA b� htA BA�yE�nrAEvEv'�vAEn k� Z� t� mEh�vA Ad�vFmA'yA� sht� d� r�vA� EffFt� f� Y� r0s� EvEn0� � -�

9. This Flame of Will shines out with the vast light of Truthand makes all things manifest by the greatness of him. Heoverpowers the formations of knowledge5 that are undivineand of an evil movement; he sharpens his horns to gore theRakshasa.

ut �vAnAso EdEv q�v�n�E�t�mAy� DA r0s� htvA u md� Ecd�y zjEt BAmA n vrt� pErbADo ad�vF� � �.�

5 Maya. There are two kinds of Maya, the divine and undivine, the formations of thetruth and the formations of the falsehood.


10. May the voices of the Flame in our heavens be sharp-weaponed to slay the Rakshasa! In his ecstasy his angrylustres break all that opposes his advance; the energiesundivine that obstruct us from every side cannot pen himin.

et� t� �tom� t� EvjAt Ev o rT� n DFr� �vpA at0m� ydFd�n� Et �v� d�v hyA'� �vv'tFrp enA jy�m � ��

11. O thou who art born in many forms, I illumined in mind,accomplished in understanding, perfect in works, have fash-ioned for thee this song of thy affirming to be as if thychariot. If thou, O Strength, take an answering delight in it,by this we may conquer the waters that carry the light ofthe luminous heaven.6

t� Evg�Fvo v� qBo vAv� DAno�f{vy'� smjAEt v�d� itFmmE�nmm� tA avocn� bEh'�mt� mnv� fm' y�sd� -

DEv�mt� mnv� fm' y�st� � ��

12. The strong-necked7 Bull increases in us and drives to us thetreasure of knowledge8 that was withheld by our enemy; noris there any to destroy it. For so have the Powers Immortalspoken to the Strength that he work out peace for the manwho enlarges the seat of sacrifice, that he work out peacefor the man who carries in his hand the oblation.

6 Swar, the divine mind pure to the luminous Truth.7 Or, many-necked.8 The wealth of the luminous herds.

The Third Hymn to Agni

THE DIVINE FORCE,CONQUEROR OF THE SUPREME GOOD

[The Divine Will-Force is that of which all the other godheadsare forms and he manifests all these powers of supreme Truthas he grows in us. Thus the supreme state of conscious beingis attained and by that our complex and manifold existence ismaintained in the Light and the Joy. The Rishi prays that theevil may not be allowed to express itself again in him, that thesecret soul in us who is the Father of things but in us appears asthe child of our works and our evolution, may open itself to thevast Truth-consciousness. The Divine Flame will destroy all thepowers of falsehood and evil who seek to make us stumble andwould rob us of our heavenly treasure.]

�vm�n� vzZo jAys� yt� �v� Em�o BvEs yt� sEmd� D� �v� Ev�v� shs�p� � d�vA��vEmd� o dAf� q� m�yA'y � ��

1. Thou art he of the Wideness,1 O Will, when thou art born;thou becomest the Lord of Love2 when thou art entirelykindled. In thee are all the gods, O son of Force; thou artthe Power-in-Mind3 for the mortal who gives the offering.

�vmy'mA BvEs yt� knFnA� nAm �vDAvn� g� |� EbBEq' aREt Em�� s� EDt� n goEBy'd� d�ptF smnsA k� ZoEq � ��

1 Varuna, who represents the ethereal purity and oceanic wideness of the infiniteTruth.2 Mitra, the all-embracing harmony of the Truth, the Friend of all beings, therefore

the Lord of Love.3 Indra, Ruler of our being, Master of Swar which is the luminous world of the Divine

Mind.


2. O thou who possessest self-ordering Nature, thou becomestthe might of the Aspirer4 when thou bearest the secret Nameof the Virgins.5 They brighten thee with the Light in her raysas Love6 perfectly founded when thou makest of one mindthe Lord and his Spouse7 in their mansion.

tv E)y� mzto mj'yt zd� yt� t� jEnm cAz Ec�m� pd� yd� Ev�Zozpm� EnDAEy t�n pAEs g� |� nAm gonAm� � ��

3. For the glory of thee, O Violent One, the Thought-Powersmake to shine out by their pressure that which is thy richand beautiful birth.8 When that highest stride9 of Vishnuhas been established within, thou protectest by it the secretName of the herds of the Radiance.10

tv E)yA s� d� fo d�v d�vA� p� # dDAnA am� t� spt hotArmE�n� mn� qo En q�d� d'f�yt uEfj� f�smAyo� � ��

4. By the glory of thee because thou hast right vision, Ogodhead, the gods holding all that multiple existence tasteimmortality and men take their seat in the Force that offersthe oblation and, desiring, they distribute to the godheadsthe self-expression of the being.

n �vd� DotA p� vo' a�n� yjFyAn� n kA4y�� pro aE�t �vDAv� Evf�c y�yA aEtETB'vAEs s y��n vnvd� d�v mtA'n� � "�

4 Aryaman, the aspiring power and action of the Truth.5 Probably, the unripe Radiances that our aspiration has to prepare for their union

with the higher power of the soul; Aryaman holds their secret sense, the Name orNumen, which is manifested when aspiration arrives at the light of knowledge andMitra harmonises soul and nature.6 Mitra.7 The Soul and Nature. The mansion is the human body.8 The supreme world of Light. Agni is said elsewhere to become in his being the highest

of the shining worlds.9 Vishnu has three strides or movements, earth, heaven and the supreme world of

which Light, Truth and the Sun are the foundation.10 The highest divine sense of the illuminations of Knowledge is found in the supercon-scient worlds of supreme Light.

Hymns to Agni 403

5. There is none that precedeth thee as the priest of the oblationnor any mightier for sacrifice; O Flame, none is supreme overthee in the things of the Wisdom, thou who possessest theself-ordering power of Nature. The creature of whom thoubecomest the guest, O godhead, prevails by sacrifice over allthat belong to the mortality.

vym�n� vn� yAm �votA vs� yvo hEvqA b� 2ymAnA� vy� smy�' EvdT��v^A� vy� rAyA shs�p� � mtA'n� � (�

6. May we, O Flame, fostered by thee and awakened, seekersof the substance, prevail by the offering, — we in the greatstruggle, we in the comings of knowledge in our days,11 weby the felicity, O son of Force, overcome all that are mortal.

yo n aAgo a�y�no BrA�yDFdGmGf�s� dDAt jhF EcEk�vo aEBfE�tm�tAm�n� yo no mc'yEt �y�n � *�

7. The expresser of evil who seeks to bring sin and transgres-sion into us, his own evil do thou return upon his head; slay,O conscious knower, this hostile self-expression of him whooppresses us with the duality.

�vAm�yA 4y� Eq d�v p� v�' d� t� k� vAnA ayjt h4y�� s��T� yd�n Iys� ryFZA� d�vo mt�'v's� EBEr2ymAn� � ,�

8. Thee, O Godhead, in the dawning of this our Night theAncients12 made their messenger and through thee sacrificedby their offerings because thou art the godhead that is beingkindled by the mortal dwellers in this substance and thoumovest to the meeting-place13 of all felicities.

11 The periods of Light visiting the soul.12 The ancient seers who discovered the secret wisdom.13 The supreme world of Truth and Bliss.


av �p� ED Eptr� yoED Ev�An� p� �o y�t� shs� s� n Uh� kdA& EcEk�vo aEB c0s� no��n� kdA !tEcd� yAtyAs� � -�

9. Deliver the Father and in thy knowledge put away evil fromhim who is borne in us as thy son, O child of Force. Whenwilt thou have that vision for us, O conscious Knower?when wilt thou, O Truth-conscious Will, impel us to thejourney?

B� Er nAm vdmAno dDAEt EptA vso yEd t?joqyAs� k� Evd� d�v�y shsA ckAn� s� 7mE�nv'nt� vAv� DAn� � �.�

10. Then indeed the Father adores and holds, O Dweller in thesubstance, the vast Name14 when thou makest him to acceptand cleave to it. Will in us desires the bliss and, increasing,wins it entirely by the force of the Godhead.15

�vmY jErtAr� yEv�W Ev�vAy�n� d� ErtAEt pEq' �t�nA ad� )n� Erpvo jnAso��Atk�tA v� EjnA aB� vn� � ��

11. Thou, O Will, O youngest vigour, carriest thy adorer beyondall stumblings into grief and evil; for the creatures are seenof thee who would do hurt to us and are thieves in theirhearts, — they whose perceptions are void of the knowledgeand therefore they have fallen into the crookedness.

im� yAmAs��vEd� gB� vn� vsv� vA tEddAgo avAEc nAhAymE�nrEBf�ty� no n rFqt� vAv� DAn� prA dAt� � ��

12. Lo, all these movements of our journeying have turned theirfaces towards thee, and for that evil in us, it is declaredto the Dweller in our being. O never can this Will in hisincreasing betray us to the hurter of our self-expression; hewill not deliver us into the hands of our enemy!

14 The world of Truth is also called the Wideness or the Vast or the Vast Truth.15 The Deva, the supreme Deity, of whom all the gods are different Names and Powers.

The Fourth Hymn to Agni

THE DIVINE WILL,PRIEST, WARRIOR AND LEADER OF OUR JOURNEY

[The Rishi hymns the Divine Force that knows all the successivebirths of the soul on its ascending planes of existence and aspriest of his upward and onward-journeying sacrifice gives himthe purity, the power, the knowledge, the increasing riches, thefaculty of new formation and spiritual productiveness by whichthe mortal grows into immortality. It destroys the enemy, theassailants, the powers of evil, enriches the soul with all they tryto withhold, gives the triple peace and the triple fulfilment of themental, vital and physical being and, labouring in the light ofthe supramental Truth, leads beyond, creating in us the worldof immortal felicity.]

�vAm�n� vs� pEt� vs� nAmEB md� a2vr�q� rAjn� �vyA vj� vAjyto jy�mA�EB �yAm p� �s� tFm'�yA'nAm� � ��

1. Strength, master over the lords of substance, towards thee Idirect my delight in the march of my sacrifices. O King, bythee, increasing thy plenitudes, may we conquer our plentyand overcome the embattled assaults of mortal powers.

h4yvA1E�nrjr� EptA no EvB� Ev'BAvA s� d� fFko a�m� s� gAh'p�yA� sEmqo EddF|�m}k� s� EmmFEh )vA�Es � ��

2. Strength unaging that bears the oblation is the Father of us,he in us pervades in being and is extended in light and is per-fect in vision. Kindle altogether thy strengths of impulsion


that belong perfectly to the Master in our dwelling,1 formaltogether thy inspirations of knowledge and turn themtowards us.

EvfA� kEv� Ev�pEt� mAn� qFZAm� f� Ec� pAvk� G� tp� �WmE�nm� En hotAr� Ev�vEvd� dED2v� s d�v�q� vnt� vAyA'EZ � ��

3. Will that is the Seer and Lord of the creature in the humanpeoples, that is pure and purifies, with his surface of themind’s clarities, Will omniscient hold in you as the priest ofyour oblations, for this is he that wins for you your desirableboons in the godheads.

j� q�vA�n i1yA sjoqA ytmAno rE�mEB� s� y'�y j� q�v n� sEmD� jAtv�d aA c d�vAn� hEvr%Ay vE0 � ��

4. Becoming of one heart with the goddess of Truth-vision,2

labouring by the rays of the Sun of Light, cleave to us withlove, O Strength: accept in heart thy fuel in us, O Knowerof the Births, and bring to us the gods that they may eat ofour offering.

j� �Vo dm� nA aEtETd�'roZ im� no y�m� p yAEh Ev�An� Ev�vA a�n� aEBy� jo Evh�yA f�� ytAmA BrA BojnAEn � "�

5. Domiciled in our gated dwelling, the Guest loved and ac-cepted, come to this our sacrifice in all thy knowledge; allthese energies slay that set themselves to attack us and bringto us their enjoyments who make themselves our enemies.3

vD�n d�y�� Eh cAty�v vy� k� vAn�tv� �vAy� EppEq' yt� shs�p� � d�vA�so a�n� pAEh n� tm vAj� a�mAn� � (�

1 Agni is here the supreme Will dwelling in us, Father and Lord of our being; he is toact in us entirely by the divine will and knowledge.2 Ila.3 All hostile energies that attack the soul of man possess certain riches which he needs

and has to wrest from them in order to arrive at his perfect plenitude.

Hymns to Agni 407

6. Chase from us with thy blow the Divider, make a free spacefor thine own body! When, O Son of Force, thou art carryingthe gods over to their goal,4 protect us in the plenitude ofour possession, O Strength, O mightiest Deity.

vy� t� a�n u/T�Ev'D�m vy� h4y�� pAvk Bd� foc� a�m� rEy� Ev�vvAr� sEmvA�m� Ev�vAEn d� EvZAEn D�Eh � *�

7. May we order aright for thee our sacrifice by our wordsand by our offerings, O Will that purifiest, O happy flameof purity; in us pervade a felicity of all desirable boons, inus confirm all substance of our riches.

a�mAkm�n� a2vr� j� q�v shs� s� no E�qD�T h4ym� vy� d�v�q� s� k� t� �yAm fm'ZA nE��v#T�n pAEh � ,�

8. O Will, O Son of Force who dwellest in the three worlds5

of our session, cleave in heart to our sacrifice, cleave toour oblation. May we become perfect in our works in thegodheads; protect us by thy peace triple-armoured.6

Ev�vAEn no d� g'hA jAtv�d� EsD�� n nAvA d� ErtAEt pEq' a�n� aE�v�msA g� ZAno��mAk� bo2yEvtA tn� nAm� � -�

9. O Knower of the Births, bear us over every difficult crossing,yea, over all stumblings into evil as in a ship that travelsover the waters. O Will, expressed by us with our obeisanceof submission as the Eater of things, awake in us, be thefosterer of our embodyings.7

4 The divine powers in us are carried to their goal in the Truth and Bliss by the forceof the Divine Will working in man.5 Mental, vital, physical, the lower “births” all the knowledge of which the Divine

Will, knower of our Births, possesses and through which it has to lead the ascendingsacrifice to the supramental.6 The peace, joy and full satisfaction in the mental, vital and physical being.7 Not only the physical body, but the vital and mental sheaths, all the embodied states

or forms of the soul.


y��vA 3dA kFErZA mymAno�m�y: m�yo' johvFEm jAtv�do yfo a�mAs� D�Eh jAEBr�n� am� t�vm�yAm� � �.�

10. I meditate on thee with a heart that does the Work and,mortal, I call to the Immortal. O Will, O Knower of theBirths, confirm victory in us; by the children of my worksmay I enjoy immortality.

y�m� �v� s� k� t� jAtv�d u lokm�n� k� Zv� �yonm� aE�vn� s p� E�Z� vFrvt� gomt� rEy� nft� �vE�t � ��

11. O Knower of the Births, the man perfect in his works forwhom thou createst that other blissful world,8 reaches afelicity that is peopled happily with his life’s swiftnesses, hisherds of Light, the children of his soul, the armies of hisenergy.9

8 The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as theresult of a constant expansion and self-perfecting.9 The constant Vedic symbols of the Horse, Cow, Son, Hero. The sons or children are

the new soul-formations which constitute the divine Personality, the new births withinus. The heroes are the mental and moral energies which resist the assaults of ignorance,division, evil and falsehood. The vital powers are the motive forces that bear us on ourjourney and are therefore symbolised by the Horse. The herds are the illuminations thatcome to us from the supramental Truth, herding rays of the sun of Light.

The Fifth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE SUMMONING OF THE GODS

[The hymn calls to the sacrifice by the summons of the divineFlame the principal godheads. Each is described or invoked inthat capacity and functioning in which he is needed and helpfulto the perfection of the soul and its divine growth and attaining.]

s� sEmd� DAy foEcq� G� t� tFv�� j� hotn a�ny� jAtv�ds� � ��

1. To the Will that knoweth all the births, to the Flame highlykindled, purely luminous offer a poignant clarity.

nrAf�s� s� q� dtFm� y�mdA�y� kEvEh' mD� h��y� � ��

2. This is he that expresses the powers of the gods, the un-tameable who speeds on its way this our sacrifice, this is theseer who comes with the wine of sweetness in his hands.

IE1to a�n aA vh�d�� Ec�Emh E ym� s� K� rT�EB#ty� � ��

3. O Strength, we have sought thee with our adoration, bringhither the God-Mind1 bright and dear in his happy chariots2

for our increasing.

1 Indra.2 The plural is used to indicate the manifold movement of the Divine Mind in its

completeness.


UZ'm�dA Ev T�vA��ykA' an� qt BvA n� f� B� sAty� � ��

4. Widely spread thyself,3 softly, thickly covering; towards theelighten the voices of our illumination. Be white and brightin us that we may conquer.

d�vF�A'ro Ev )y2v� s� AyZA n Uty� y�� p� ZFtn � "�

5. Swing open, O ye Doors divine,4 and give us easy passage forour expanding; farther, farther lead and fill full our sacrifice.

s� tFk� vyov� DA yh� vF !t�y mAtrA doqAm� qAsmFmh� � (�

6. Darkness and Dawn5 we desire, two mighty Mothers of theTruth, fairly fronting us, increasers of our spacious being.

vAt�y p�m�FE1tA d�4yA hotArA mn� q� im� no y�mA gtm� � *�

7. And O ye divine Priests of our humanity, O worshippedTwain, approach on the paths of the Life-breath to this oursacrifice.

3 This verse is addressed to Indra, the Power of divine Mind, through whom comes theillumination of the supramental Truth; by the advancing chariots of this giver of Lightwe conquer our divine possessions.4 Man’s sacrifice is his labour and aspiration Godwards and is represented as travelling

through the opening doors of the concealed heavenly realms, kingdoms conquered insuccession by the expanding soul.5 Night and Day, symbols of the alternation of the divine and human consciousness

in us. The Night of our ordinary consciousness holds and prepares all that the Dawnbrings out into conscious being.

Hymns to Agni 411

i1A sr�vtF mhF Et5o d�vFm'yoB� v� bEh'� sFd�vE5D� � ,�

8. She of the vision of knowledge, she of its flowing inspiration,she of its vastness, three goddesses6 who give birth to theBliss, they who stumble not,7 may they take their seats atthe altar strewn of the sacrifice.

Efv��v�VErhA gEh EvB� � poq ut �mnA y��y�� n udv � -�

9. O Fashioner of things,8 beneficent hither come to us; per-vader of all in thy being, in thy nourishing of all and withthyself,9 in sacrifice after sacrifice foster our ascension.

y� v�T vn�pt� d�vAnA� g� |A nAmAEn t� h4yAEn gAmy � �.�

10. O Master of Delight,10 to that goal11 where thou knowestthe secret Names of the gods, thither lead our offerings.

�vAhA�ny� vzZAy �vAh�d� Ay mz~� �vAhA d�v��yo hEv� � ��

6 Ila, Saraswati, Mahi; their names are translated in order to give the idea of theirfunctions.7 Or, who are not assailed, cannot be attacked by the ignorance and darkness, cause

of our suffering.8 Twashtri.9 The Divine as the Fashioner of things pervades all that He fashions both with His

immutable self-existence and with that mutable becoming of Himself in things by whichthe soul seems to grow and increase and take on new forms. By the former He is theindwelling Lord and Maker, by the latter He is the material of his own works.10 Soma.11 The Ananda, the state of divine Beatitude in which all the powers of our being arerevealed in their perfect godhead, here secret and hidden from us.


11. Swaha to the Will and to the Lord of Wideness,12 Swaha tothe God-Mind and to the Thought-Powers,13 Swaha to thegodheads be the food of our oblation.14

12 Varuna.13 The Maruts, nervous or vital forces of our being which attain to conscious expressionin the thought, singers of the hymn to Indra, the God-Mind.14 That is, let all in us that we offer to the divine Life be turned into the self-light andself-force of the divine Nature.

The Sixth Hymn to Agni

THE GALLOPING FLAME-POWERS OF THE JOURNEY

[The flames of Agni the divine Will, home and meeting-placeof all our increasing and advancing life-powers, are imaged asgalloping on our human journey to the supreme good. DivineWill creates in us the divine strength of impulsion, an illuminedand undecaying force and flame described as the steed of theplenitude, which brings us that good and carries us to that goal.His flames are coursers on the path who increase by the sacrifice;they hasten uninterruptedly, and race always more swiftly; theybring in the penned-up illuminations of the hidden knowledge.Their entire force and rapidity are accorded when the divineStrength is filled and satisfied with the sacrificial offerings.]

aE�n� t� my� yo vs� r�t� y� yEt D�nv� a�tmv't aAfvo��t� En�yAso vAEjn iq� �tot� �y aA Br � ��

1. On Strength I meditate who is the dweller in substance andto him as their home go our fostering herds, to him as theirhome our swift war-steeds,1 to him as their home our powersof the plenitude.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.2

so aE�nyo' vs� g�'Z� s� ymAyEt D�nv� smv'to rG� d� � v� s� s� jAtAs� s� ry iq� �tot� �y aA Br � ��

1 The Horse is the symbol of Force in the Veda, especially of vital force. It is variouslythe Arvat or war-steed in the battle and the Vajin, the steed of the journey which bringsus in the plenty of our spiritual wealth.2 The power that enables us to make the journey through the night of our being to the

divine Light.


2. He is that Strength who is the dweller in substance; himI express in whom come together3 our fostering herds, inwhom meet our swiftly galloping war-steeds, in whom ourluminous seers that come to perfect birth in us.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

aE�nEh' vAEjn� Evf� ddAEt Ev�vcq'EZ� a�nF rAy� �vAB� v� s Fto yAEt vAy'Emq� �tot� �y aA Br � ��

3. Will, the universal toiler, gives to the creature his steed of theplenitude, Will gives that which comes into entire being inus for the felicity and, satisfied, it journeys to the desirablegood.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

aA t� a�n iDFmEh %� mt� d�vAjrm� yd� D �yA t� pnFysF sEmd� dFdyEt %vFq� �tot� �y aA Br � ��

4. That fire of thee we kindle O God, O Flame, luminous,unaging, when that more effective force of thy labour blazesin our heavens.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

aA t� a�n !cA hEv� f� +�y foEcq�pt� s� �cd� d�m Ev�pt� h4yvAV� t� �y� h� yt iq� �tot� �y aA Br � "�

5. Will, master of the pure-bright flame, thine is the offeringcast by the illumining word; bearer of the oblation, to thee itis cast, O master of the creature, achiever of works, perfectin delight.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

o �y� a�nyo�E�nq� Ev�v� p� �yEt vAy'm� t� EhEvr� t iEvr� t iq y�yAn� qEgq� �tot� �y aA Br � (�

3 All our growing powers of force and knowledge move towards the manifestation ofthe divine Knowledge-Force and in it combine and are harmonised.

Hymns to Agni 415

6. Those are thy flames that in these thy other flames nourishand advance every desirable good; they, they race! they, theyrun! they drive on in their impulsions without a break.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

tv �y� a�n� ac'yo mEh v�ADt vAEjn� y� p�vEB� fPAnA� v�jA B� rt gonAEmq� �tot� �y aA Br � *�

7. Those are thy fiery rays, O Will, steeds of the plenitude, andthey increase into the largeness and with tramplings of theirhooves they bring in the pens of the luminous kine.4

Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

nvA no a�n aA Br �tot� �y� s� E0tFErq� t� �yAm y aAn� c� ��vAd� tAso dm�dm iq� �tot� �y aA Br � ,�

8. Bring, O Will, to those who affirm thee new strengths ofimpulsion that find aright their dwelling-place;5 may we bethey who because they have thee for their messenger, singthe hymn of illumination in home and home.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

uB� s� �cd� sEp'qo dvF' )FZFq aAsEn uto n ut� p� p� yA' u/T�q� fvs�pt iq� �tot� �y aA Br � -�

9. Both6 ladles of the running richness thou approachest to thymouth, O perfect in delight; mayst thou in our speakingsutterly fill thyself, O master of shining strength.Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

4 The illuminations of the divine Truth penned up in the cavern of the subconscient bythe lords of sense-action.5 That is, they take us to our home in the world of Truth, the superconscient plane, own

home of Agni, in which all these impulsions advancing find their rest and dwelling-place.It is reached by an ascent from plane to plane opened in succession by the power of thedivine illumining Word.6 Perhaps, the divine and the human delight.


evA& aE�nmj� y'm� gF'EB'y'��EBrAn� qk� dDd�m� s� vFy'm� t �ydA�v�4yEmq� �tot� �y aA Br � �.�

10. So by our words and our sacrifices they without any breakdrive and control the Strength. May he establish in us anutter energy7 and that swift galloping force.8

Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.

7 The hero-power of the battling soul.8 Asu asvyam, the swift Horse-Power, with a play on the two words giving it the sense

of “swift horse-swiftness”.

The Seventh Hymn to Agni

THE DIVINE WILL, DESIRER, ENJOYER, PROGRESSIVEFROM THE ANIMAL TO BLISS AND KNOWLEDGE

[Agni is hymned as the divine Force that brings the bliss and theray of the truth into the human being and light into the night ofour darkness. He leads men in their labour to his own infinitelevels; he enjoys and tears up the objects of earthly enjoyment,but all his multitude of desires are for the building of a universal-ity, an all-embracing enjoyment in the divine home of the humanbeing. He is the animal moving as the enjoyer by the progressivemovement of Nature, as with an axe through the forest, to theachievement and the bliss. This passionate, emotional, animalbeing of man is given by him to be purified into the peace andbliss; in it he establishes a divine light and knowledge and theawakened state of the soul.]

sKAy� s� v� sMy`Emq� �tom� cA�ny� vEq'�WAy E0tFnAm� jo' nJ�� sh�vt� � ��

1. O comrades, in you an absolute force of impulsion and anutter affirming for the Strength that lavishes all his abun-dance on the worlds of our dwelling,1 for the master ofForce, for the son of Energy.

k� �A Ecd� y�y sm� tO r vA nro n� qdn� ah'tE�cd� yEmDt� s�jnyEt jtv� � ��

1 Or, on the dwellers in the world.


2. Wheresoever man’s soul comes to the utter meeting withhim, it becomes full of delight in its dwelling-place. Eventhey who are adepts in the strength continue to kindle theflame of him and all creatures born work to bring him toperfect birth.

s� yEdqo vnAmh� s� h4yA mAn� qAZAm� ut %� 7�y fvs !t�y rE�mmA dd� � ��

3. When wholly we possess and enjoy our strengths of impul-sion, wholly all that men offer as a sacrifice, then I receivethe ray of the Truth in its illumination and shining energy.2

s �mA k� ZoEt k�t� mA n/t� Ecd� d� r aA st� pAvko yd� vn�ptFn� �mA EmnA�yjr� � ��

4. Verily he creates the light of perception even for one whosits far off in the night, when himself undecaying the purifiercompresses the lords3 of the woodland of delight.

av �m y�y v�qZ� �v�d� pETq� j� h� vEt aBFmh �vj�y� B� mA p� �W�v zzh� � � "�

5. When in his circling men cast the sweat4 of their toil as anoffering on the paths, then they ascend to him where he sitsself-joyous5 like climbers who arrive upon large levels.6

2 Or, “of the light, the luminous force, the truth.”3 Vanaspatın, in its double sense, the trees, the lords of the forest, growths of the earth,

our material existence, and lords of delight. Soma, producer of the immortalising wine,is the typical vanaspati.4 An equivoque on the double sense of the word, sweat and the rich droppings of the

food-offering.5 Or, self-victorious.6 These are the wide free infinite planes of existence founded on the Truth, the open

levels opposed elsewhere to the uneven crookednesses which shut in men limiting theirvision and obstructing their journey.

Hymns to Agni 419

y� m�y'� p� z�p� h� Evdd� Ev�v�y DAys� �vAdn� Ept� nAm�ttAEt� EcdAyv� � (�

6. Him shall mortal man come to know as the godhead whohas this multitude of his desires that he may establish in usthe all; for he reaches forward to the sweet taste of all foodsand he builds a home7 for this human being.

s Eh �mA DvAE0t� dAtA n dA�yA pf� � EhEr�m)� � f� Ecd�� B� rEnB� �VtEvEq� � *�

7. Yea, he teareth to pieces this desert8 in which we dwell asthe Animal that teareth its food; the beard of this Beast isof the golden light, his fang is a purity and the force in himis not afflicted by his heats.

f� Ec� �m y�mA aE�vt� �vEDtFv rFyt� s� q� rs� t mAtA +AZA ydAnf� Bgm� � ,�

8. Pure indeed is he for whom as for the eater of things there isthe flowing progression by Nature,9 as by an axe, and witha happy travail she, his Mother, brought him forth that hemay accomplish her works and taste of the enjoyment.10

7 The home of man, the higher divine world of his existence which is being formedby the gods in his being through the sacrifice. This home is the complete Beatitude intowhich all human desires and enjoyings have to be transformed and lose themselves.Therefore Agni, the purifier, devours all the forms of material existence and enjoymentin order to reduce them to their divine equivalent.8 The material existence not watered by the streams or rivers which descend from the

superconscient Bliss and Truth.9 Again an equivoque on the double sense of svadhiti, an axe or other cleaving instru-

ment and the self-ordering power of Nature, Swadha. The image is of the progress ofthe divine Force through the forests of the material existence as with an axe. But the axeis the natural self-arranging progression of Nature, the World-Energy, the Mother fromwhom this divine Force, son of Energy, is born.10 The divine enjoyment, bhaga, typified by the god Bhaga, the Enjoyer in the power ofthe Truth.


aA y�t� sEp'rAs� t��n� fmE�t DAys� e�q� %� 7m� t )v aA Ec�� m�y�'q� DA� � -�

9. O strength, O presser out on us of the running richness,when thou findest one who is a glad peace11 for the estab-lishing of thy works, in such mortals illumination establishand inspired knowledge and the conscious soul.

iEt Ecmy� mED�j��vAdAtmA pf�� dd� aAd�n� ap� Zto�E�� sAs|Ad� d�y� Enq� sAs|A�6 n� � �.�

10. For to this end I born in the material existence receive asthy gift the emotional mind and the animal being.12 Yea, OWill, may the eater of things overpower the Dividers13 whominister not to his fullness; these souls that rush upon himwith their impulsions may he overcome.

11 Sam and sarma in the Veda express the idea of peace and joy, the joy that comes ofthe accomplished labour, samı, or work of the sacrifice: the toil of the battle and thejourney find their rest, a foundation of beatitude is acquired which is already free fromthe pain of strife and effort.12 Literally, passion-mind and the animal; but the word pasu may also mean, as itdoes oftenest in the Veda, the symbolic Cow of light; in that case the sense will be theemotional mind and the illumined mind. But the first rendering agrees better with thegeneral sense of the hymn and with its previous use of the word.13 The Dasyus who hack and cut up the growth and unity of the soul and seek to assailand destroy its divine strength, joy and knowledge. They are powers of Darkness, thesons of Danu or Diti the divided being.

The Eighth Hymn to Agni

DIVINE WILL, THE UNIVERSAL FULFILLER

[The Rishi having declared the continuity of the great effort andaspiration from the earliest times hymns divine Will harbouredin us, inmate, priest of the sacrifice, master of this dwelling,who fulfils the universal impulse in all its multiplicity and bothstimulates and leads it in act and knowledge.]

�vAm�n !tAyv� smFEDr� $� $As Uty� sh�k� t p� z�cd�� yjt� Ev�vDAys� dm� ns� g� hpEt� vr� ym� � ��

1. Will who art by force created in us, thee the pristine Powerthe pristine seekers of the Truth kindled entirely that theymight grow in their being, the god in the sacrifice, who be-cause he has the multitude of his delights establishes the all,1

domiciled in us, master of the dwelling, inmate supremelydesirable.

�vAm�n� aEtET� p� 4y: Evf� foEc�k�f� g� hpEt� En q�Edr� b� h�k�t�� p� z#p� Dn�p� t� s� fmA'Z� �vvs� jrE�qm� � ��

2. Will, in thee the supreme2 guest and master of the housewith his locks of light the peoples take their foundationbecause thou hast with thee vast vision and the multitude ofthy forms and the extraction of our riches and the perfectpeace and perfect being and the destruction of enemies.3

1 Or, fosters all.2 “First”, both original and supreme.3 The hostile powers who try to break up the unity and completeness of our being

and from whom the riches which rightly belong to us have to be rescued, not humanenemies.


�vAm�n� mAn� qFrF1t� Evfo ho�AEvd� EvEvEc� r$DAtmm� g� hA st� s� Bg Ev�vdf't� t� Ev�vZs� s� yj� G� tE)ym� � ��

3. Will, thee the human peoples seek with their adoration whohast knowledge of the powers4 of the sacrifice and rightlydiscriminating holdest for us utterly the delight and thou artseated in our secret being, O perfect enjoyer, seeing with auniversal vision, pouring the multitude of thy voices, doingaright the sacrifice, agleam with the glory of the clarity.

�vAm�n� DZ'Es� Ev�vDA vy� gFEB'g�'Zto nmsop s�Edm s no j� q�v sEmDAno aEYro d�vo mt'�y yfsA s� dFEtEB� � ��

4. Will who sustainest the law of things in their universality,thee we approach with obeisance of submission and expressthee by the words; so do thou, O puissant seer, approve andcleave to us, a godhead set high-blazing by the victory5 ofthe mortal, by his right illuminings.

�vm�n� p� z#po Evf�Evf� vyo dDAEs $TA p� z�V� t p� # y�A shsA Ev rAjEs E�vEq� sA t� EtE�vqAZ�y nAD� q� � "�

5. Will multiply affirmed, thou takest many forms accordingto the man and establishest for each his wide manifestationeven as of old; thou illuminest in thy force the many thingsthat are thy food and none can do violence to that blaze ofthy light when so thou blazest up.

�vAm�n� sEmDAn� yEv�� d�vA d� t� cE+r� h4yvAhnm� uz�ys� G� tyoEnmAh� t� �v�q� c0� d'EDr� codymEt � (�

6. Will, youngest vigour, thee the gods have kindled high andmade their envoy to man and the bearer of his offerings;wide in thy rapidities, born from the clarity, receiver of the

4 Or, the process of the oblation.5 Attainment, or the splendour or glory.

Hymns to Agni 423

oblation, thee they have set in him as a keen and burningeye that urges his mentality.

�vAm�n� Edv aAh� t� G� t�� s� 7Ayv� s� qEmDA smFEDr� s vAv� DAn aoqDFEBzE0to�EB �yA�Es pAET'vA Ev Et�Ws� � *�

7. Will, thee men who seek the bliss kindle high with an entirekindling, fed by their clarities in the front of heaven;6 soincreasing, diffused by its growths that hold its heats, thouenterest widely into all the earth-life’s speeding movements.

6 Heaven and earth, the pure mental being and the material consciousness.

The Ninth Hymn to Agni

DIVINE WILL ASCENDENTFROM THE ANIMAL TO MENTALITY

[The Rishi speaks of the birth of the divine Will by the workingof the pure mental on the material consciousness, its involvedaction in man’s ordinary state of mortal mind emotional, ner-vous, passionate marked by crooked activities and perishableenjoyments and its emergence on the third plane of our beingwhere it is forged and sharpened into a clear and effective powerfor liberation and spiritual conquest. It knows all the births orplanes of our existence and leads the sacrifice and its offeringsby a successive and continuous progress to the divine goal andhome.]

�vAm�n� hEv�mto d�v� mtA's I1t� my� �vA jAtv�ds� s h4yA v�yAn� qk� � ��

1. Thee the godhead mortals with the oblation seek, O Will;on thee I meditate who knowest the births; therefore thoucarriest to the goal our offerings without a break.

aE�nho'tA dA�vt� 0y�y v� /tbEh'q� s� y�As�crEt y� s� vAjAs� )v�yv� � ��

2. Will is the priest of the oblation for man who gives theoffering and forms the seat of sacrifice and attains to hishome; for in him our works of sacrifice converge and in himour plenitudes of the Truth’s inspirations.

ut �m y� Eff�� yTA nv� jEn�VArZF DtA'r� mAn� qFZA� EvfAmE�n� �v2vrm� � ��

Hymns to Agni 425

3. True too it is that thou art born from the two Workings1

like a new-born infant, thou who art the upholder of thehuman peoples, Will that leads aright the sacrifice.

ut �m d� g�'BFys� p� �o n h� vAyA'ZAm� p� # yo d�DAEs vnA�n� pf� n' yvs� � ��

4. True too it is that thou art hard to seize as a son of crooked-nesses2 when thou devourest the many growths of delightlike an Animal that feeds in his pasture.

aD �m y�yAc'y� sMyk� s�yEt D� Emn� ydFmh E�to Ed4y� p 2mAt�v DmEt EffFt� 2mAtrF yTA � "�

5. But afterwards thy fiery rays with their smoky passion meettogether entirely; oh then, the third Soul3 forges him in ourheavens like a smith in his smithy; ’tis as if in the smithhimself that he whets him into a weapon of sharpness.4

tvAhm�n UEtEBEm'��y c fE�tEB� ��qoy� to n d� ErtA t� yA'm m�yA'nAm� � (�

6. O Will, may I by thy expandings and thy expressings of theLord of Love, — yea, may we, as men assailed by enemies,so besieged by discords, pass through and beyond thesestumblings of mortals.

1 The two Aranis or tinders by which the fire is struck out; the word can also meanworkings and is related to arya. Heaven and Earth are the two Aranis which produceAgni; Heaven his father, Earth his mother.2 Literally, of the crooked ones, possibly the seven rivers or movements of our being

winding through the obstructions of our mortal existence.3 Trita Aptya, the Third or Triple, apparently the Purusha of the mental plane. In the

tradition he is a Rishi and has two companions significantly named Eka, one or single,and Dwita, second or double, who must be the Purushas of the material and the vital ordynamic consciousness. In the Veda he seems rather to be a god.4 The original is very compressed in style and suggestion beyond even the common

Vedic pregnancy of structure and phrase, “When, oh, him Trita forges in heaven like asmith, sharpens as in the smith”. In English we have to expand in order to bring out themeaning.


t� no a�n� aBF nro rEy� sh�v aA Br s 0�pyt� s poqyd� B� vd� vAj�y sAty ut�ED p� �s� no v� D� � *�

7. Bring to us human souls that felicity, O Will, thou forcefulone! May he shoot us forward on our path, may he nour-ish and increase us and be in us for the conquest of theplenitude. March with us in our battles that we may grow.

The Tenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE SPLENDID SOULS WHO ATTAIN

[The Rishi prays to the divine Flame to work in him by thetriple force of Power, Knowledge and Delight. He speaks ofthe splendid souls of knowledge in our humanity who attain tothe Truth and Vastness; they are the burning and overpoweringflame-rays of this transcendent Conscious-Force of the Divinethat is at work in us to climb to divine mastery. Some havebecome such souls, others are still hampered but growing. Hedesires the increasing affirmation of Agni so that all may advanceto a rich and all-comprehending universality.]

a�n aoEj�WmA Br %� 7m�m�ymED�go no rAyA prFZsA rE�s vAjAy pTAm� � ��

1. O Flame, O Ray in our limited existence, bring for us anillumination full of utter energy, by an all-encompassingfelicity cleave forward our path towards the plenitude.

�v� no a�n� a\� t +�vA d0�y m�hnA �v� as� y'mAzht� +AZA Em�o n yE�y� � ��

2. O Flame, thou supreme and wonderful thing, it is thou whoby force of will becomest in us the greatness of discerningpower; in thee the all-harmonising Friend1 in the sacrificeaccomplishes the work and climbs to divine mastery.2

1 Mitra, the Lord of Love, who introduces the principle of harmony into the workingsof the divine effort in us and thus combines all the lines of our advance, all the strands ofour sacrifice until the work is accomplished in the supreme unity of Knowledge, Powerand Delight.2 Asuryam, the god-power, the mastering force of the Lord, the divine “Asura” in us.


�v� no a�n eqA� gy� p� E�V� c vD'y y� �tom�EB� s� ryo nro mGAyAnf� � � ��

3. Thou, O Strength, increase the advancing3 and the growthof these who are splendid souls of knowledge that by theiraffirmations of thee attain to our fullnesses.

y� a�n� cd� t� Egr� f� MB�y�vrADs� f� �m�EB� f� E�mZo nro EdvE�cd� y�qA� b� ht�

s� kFEt'bo'DEt �mnA � ��

4. These are they, O Strength, O Delight, who have a happyrichness of the swift forces of life and turn to a happylight the words of the thought, souls puissant with hero-puissances, for whom even in heaven4 is the Vastness; ofitself its perfect working awakes to knowledge for these.

tv �y� a�n� ac'yo B�Ajto yEt D� �Z� yA pEr?mAno n Ev%� t� �vAno rTo n vAjy� � � "�

5. These are thy flaming rays, O Strength, that go blazingviolently and are like lightnings that run over all the quar-ters and are like a resonant chariot that speeds towards theplenitude.

n� no a�n Uty� sbADs�c rAty� a�mAkAs�c s� ryo Ev�vA aAfA�trFqEZ � (�

6. Now, O Strength, alike may those that are beset and ham-pered attain to expansion and the soul’s riches and may theseour splendid souls of knowledge traverse all the regions5 andbeyond.

3 Or attainment.4 That is to say, on the heights of the pure mentality where it meets with and passes

into the vastness of the superconscient.5 The regions of the heavens of the mental existence which have all to be embraced in

our consciousness and overpassed.

Hymns to Agni 429

�v� no a�n� aEYr� �t� t� �tvAn aA Br hotEv'�vAsh� rEy� �tot� �y� �tvs� c n ut�ED p� �s� no v� D� � *�

7. O Strength, O Soul of Puissance, when thou art affirmedand in thy affirming, bring to us, O priest of the offering,felicity6 of an all-pervading forcefulness for all that affirmthee and for thy affirmation again. March with us in ourbattles that we may grow.

6 That richness and abundance in the soul full of divine possessions which is its spiritualprosperity or felicity, an image of the infinite store of the divine Bliss and by which itadvances to an ever greater and more richly-equipped wideness of its being.

The Eleventh Hymn to Agni

A HYMN TO THE DIVINE PRIESTAND SACRIFICIAL FLAME

[The Rishi hymns the birth of the wakeful and discerning sacrifi-cial Flame who is vision and will-power, the seer whose passionof effort turns into a divine knowledge, in the heavens of mind.This seer-will the inspired words of the Thought have to increase.It is a thing of puissance, the Son of Force, and found by theancient Souls of luminous puissance concealed in the growths ofearth, in all the experiences that the soul here seeks to enjoy.]

jn�y gopA ajEn�V jAg� EvrE�n� s� d0� s� EvtAy n4ys� G� t tFko b� htA EdEv�p� fA %� md� Ev BAEt Brt��y� f� Ec� � ��

1. The protector of the creature is born, the Flame that iswakeful and perfect in discernment, for a new march tofelicity. His front is of the clarities, luminously he shineswide so that the vastness of him touches the heavens, he ispure for the bringers of the riches.

y��y k�t�� Tm� p� roEhtmE�n� nrE��qD�T� smFEDr� id��Z d�v�� srT� s bEh'Eq sFdE� hotA yjTAy s� +t� � � ��

2. Men have kindled high in the triple world1 of the session theFlame supreme to be vision in the sacrifice and the vicar setin front; he comes in one chariot with the God-Mind andthe divine Powers and sits on the seat of sacrifice, the Priestof the oblation perfect in will-power for the sacrificing.

1 The triple world of mind, life and body in which the session of our sacrifice takesplace or in which the work of self-perfection proceeds.

Hymns to Agni 431

as�m� �Vo jAys� mA�o� f� Ecm'd� � kEvzdEt�Wo Evv�vt� G� t�n �vAvD'y��n aAh� t D� m�t� k�t� rBvd� EdEv E)t� � ��

3. Unovercome and pure2 thou art born from thy motherstwain; thou hast risen up a rapturous seer from the all-luminous sun; they have increased thee with the clarity, OFlame, and the passion-smoke of thee becomes vision whenit reaches and lodges in the heavens.

aE�nno' y�m� p v�t� sAD� yA�E�n� nro Ev Brt� g� h�g� h� aE�nd�'to aBvd� D4yvAhno�E�n� v� ZAnA v� Zt� kEv+t� m� � ��

4. May the Flame come to our sacrifice with power to accom-plish; the Flame men carry into every room of their dwelling-place; the Flame has become our messenger and the bearerof our offering; when men accept the Flame into themselves,it is the seer-will that they accept.

t� �y�dm�n� mD� m�m� vc�t� �y� mnFqA iym�t� f� 3d� �vA� Egr� EsD� EmvAvnFm'hFrA p� ZEt fvsA vD'yEt c � "�

5. For thee, O Flame, this Word fraught fullest with the honey,3

for thee this Thought and may it be the peace and bliss inthy heart. For the words of the Thought satisfy and increasethee as those great fostering streams4 fill and increase thatocean.

�vAm�n� aEYrso g� hA EhtmvEvdE8CE)yAZ� vn�vn� s jAys� mLymAn� sho mht� �vAmAh� � shs�p� �mEYr� � (�

2 Or, pure without cleansing.3 The honeyed Soma-wine, outflowing of the principle of Delight in things.4 The seven rivers or movements which descend from the superconscient being and fill

the conscious ocean of our existence. They are called the Mothers, the fostering Cows,the Mighty Ones of Heaven, the Waters of Knowledge, the streams of the Truth, etc.


6. O Flame, the souls of puissance5 discovered thee hidden inthe secret place,6 lodging in every object of delight; by ourpressure on thee thou art born, a mighty force; the Son ofForce they have called thee, O Puissance.

5 The seven ancient seers or fathers, the Angiras Rishis, sons of Agni and divine orhuman types of the seer-will.6 The subconscient heart in things.

The Twelfth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF MAN’S ASPIRATION TO THE TRUTH

[The Rishi invokes this flame of the Divine Force, this vast Lordof the superconscient Truth, this Truth-conscious One, to acceptthought and word into himself, become truth-conscient in manand cleave out the many streams of the Truth. Not by mereforce of effort nor under the law of the duality can the Truth beattained, but by the Truth itself. But there are not only powers ofthis Force that battle with the falsehood and guard and conquer,there are others also who have helped so far in the march, butwho would keep to the foundation of the falsehood because theycling to the present self-expression of man and refuse to advancebeyond it; these in their self-will speak the word of crookednessto the Truth-seeker. By the sacrifice and by submission in thesacrifice man, the ever-advancing pilgrim, brings near to him hiswide dwelling-place beyond, the seat and home of the Truth.]

A�ny� b� ht� yE�yAy !t�y v� �Z� as� rAy mm G� t� n y� aA�y� s� p� t� Egr� Br� v� qBAy tFcFm� � ��

1. To Will, master of sacrifice, the Mighty One, the vast lordand diffuser of the Truth I bring forward my thought asan offering and it is as the clarified butter of the sacrificepurified in the mouth of the flame; my word1 I bring forwardthat goes to meet its lord.2

1 To turn thought and word into form and expression of the superconscient Truthwhich is hidden beyond the division and duality of the mental and physical existencewas the central idea of the Vedic discipline and the foundation of its mysteries.2 The Bull; the thought is symbolised as the shining cow fronting and offering itself to

the Godhead.


!t� EcEk�v !tEmEQcEkd� 2y� t�y DArA an� t� ED p� vF'� nAh� yAt�� shsA n �y�n !t� spAMyzq�y v� �Z� � ��

2. O conscious seer of the Truth, the Truth alone perceive inmy consciousness; cleave out3 many flowing streams of theTruth.4 Not by force, nor by the duality can I achieve thejourney nor attain to the Truth of the shining Worker, thefertilising Lord.

kyA no a�n !ty�� t�n B� vo nv�dA ucT�y n4y� v�dA m� d�v !t� pA !t� nA� nAh� pEt� sEnt� r�y rAy� � ��

3. By what thought in me, O Will, shalt thou seeking the Truthby the Truth become the impeller to knowledge of a newword? The godhead who guards the times and seasons5 ofthe Truth, knows all in me, but him I know not, the lord ofthat all-possessing felicity.

k� t� a�n� Erpv� bDnAs� k� pAyv� sEnqt %� mt� k� DAEsm�n� an� t�y pAEt k aAsto vcs� sEt gopA� � ��

4. Who are they, O Will, that are thy binders of the Enemy?who are the shining ones, the guardians, the seekers afterpossession and conquest? Who, O Will, protect the foun-dations of the falsehood? who are the keepers of a present6

word?

sKAy�t� Evq� ZA a�n et� EfvAs� sto aEfvA aB� vn� aD� q't �vym�t� vcoEB!'j� yt� v� EjnAEn b��vt� � "�

3 From the rock in the hill where they are guarded by the opposing powers.4 The descent of the superconscient into our life was imaged as the rain of heaven; it

formed the seven celestial rivers that flow down upon the earth-consciousness.5 The periods, sometimes described as years, sometimes as the twelve symbolic months

of the progress of the sacrifice.6 Or, false word. In either case it means the old falsehood as opposed to the “new

word” of the Truth of which Agni has to create the knowledge.

Hymns to Agni 435

5. These are comrades of thine, O Will, who have gone astrayfrom thee; benignant were they, they have become ma-lignant. These do violence to themselves by their wordsspeaking crooked things to the seeker after straightness.

y�t� a�n� nmsA y�mF� !t� s pA�yzq�y v� �Z� t�y 0y� p� T� rA sAD� r�t� s5A'Z�y nh� q�y f�q� � (�

6. But he, O Will, who desires with submission thy sacrifice,guards the truth of the shining Worker, the Fertiliser.7 Tohim may there come that wide habitation8 in which all isperfected, even that which is left9 for man the pilgrim toaccomplish in his forward journeying.

7 “The shining Bull or Male”, but the latter word means also the rainer, fertiliser ordiffuser of abundance and sometimes the strong and abundant, the former seems to bearalso the sense of active or moving.8 The plane of the superconscient Truth or world of Swar beyond mental Heaven and

physical earth in which all is accomplished that here we strive after; it is described asthe wide habitation and the wide and fear-free pasture of the shining cows.9 This world is sometimes described as what is left or the excess; it is the additional

field of being beyond this triplicity of mind, life and body which constitute our normalstate of existence.

The Thirteenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF AFFIRMATION OF THE DIVINE WILL

[The Rishi declares the power of the Word affirming the DivineWill who attains to the touch of heaven for man. That Willaffirmed in us by the word becomes the priest of our sacrificeand the winner in us of the divine riches and of the energy thatconquers. This godhead contains all the others in its being as thenave of a wheel contains the spokes and therefore brings us allthe varied wealth of the spiritual felicity.]

ac't��vA hvAmh��c't� sEmDFmEh a�n� ac't Uty� � ��

1. Chanting the word that illumines we call to thee, chantingthe word that illumines we kindle thee, O Will, chanting theword that illumines for our increase.

a�n�� tom� mnAmh� EsD�m% EdEv�p� f� d�v�y d� EvZ�yv� � ��

2. Today we seize with the mind the affirmation all-effective,the hymn of the Will, of the godhead that seeks for us ourdivine substance,1 of him who touches the heavens.

aE�nj�'qt no Egro hotA yo mAn� q��vA s y0d� d�4y� jnm� � ��

1 The divine riches which are the object of the sacrifice.

Hymns to Agni 437

3. May the Will accept with love our words, he who is hereas the priest in men; may he offer the sacrifice to the divinepeople.

�vm�n� s TA aEs j� �Vo hotA vr� y� �vyA y�� Ev tvt� � ��

4. Very wide and vast art thou, O Will, the priest of our offeringdesirable and beloved; by thee men extend wide the form oftheir sacrifice.

�vAm�n� vAjsAtm� Ev A vD'Et s� �V� tm� s no rA�v s� vFy'm� � "�

5. Thee, once rightly affirmed, the illumined increase, O Will,so that thou conquerest utterly the plenitude; therefore dothou lavish on us a complete hero-energy.

a�n� n�EmrrA& iv d�vA&��v� pErB� rEs aA rADE�c�m� Rs� � (�

6. O Will, as the nave of a wheel contains the spokes, so thoucontainest in thy being all the gods; thou shalt bring to us avaried joy of those riches.

The Fourteenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE FINDER OF LIGHT AND TRUTH

[The Rishi declares Agni as the Priest of the sacrifice, the slayerof the powers of Darkness, the finder of the world of the Sun ofTruth, of his radiant herds and of his luminous waters; he is theseer in us who is increased by the clarities of right thought andspeech.]

aE�n� �tom�n boDy sEmDAno am�y'm� h4yA d�v�q� no dDt� � ��

1. Awaken the Flame by the word that affirms him, kindle highthe Immortal; let him place our offerings in the godheads.

tm2vr��vF1t� d�v� mtA' am�y'm� yEj�W� mAn� q� jn� � ��

2. Him in their pilgrim sacrifices mortal men desire and adore,the divine, the immortal, who is strongest for sacrifice in thehuman creature.

t� Eh f�vt I1t� 5� cA d�v� G� t�c� tA aE�n� h4yAy vo�hv� � ��

3. Him, the godhead, man’s continuous generations adore withthe ladle1 dripping with the clarities; the Will they adore thathe may bear their offering.

1 This ladle is the constantly lifted movement of man’s aspiration towards the Truthand the Godhead.

Hymns to Agni 439

aE�njA'to aroct �n� d�y� 8?yoEtqA tm� aEvdd� gA ap� �v� � ��

4. Born, the Flame shines out slaying the Destroyers,2 yea, hesmites the Darkness with the Light and he finds the shiningHerds3 and those Waters and the luminous world.4

aE�nmF1�y� kEv� G� tp� �W� spy't v�t� m� f� Zvd� Dvm� � "�

5. The Will serve and seek, the object of our adoration, theSeer with his surface of the clarities; may he come, may hehearken to my call.

aE�n� G� t�n vAv� D� � �tom�EBEv'�vcq'EZm� �vADFEBv'c�y� EB� � (�

6. The Will men increase by the offering of their clarities, theyincrease the universal doer of their works by their hymns ofaffirmation which place aright the thought, which find therevealing word.

2 The Titans, dividers of our unity and completeness of being and sons of the Motherof Division, who are powers of the nether cave and the darkness.3 The Herds and the Waters are the two principal images of the Veda; the former are

the trooping Rays of the divine Sun, herds of the luminous Consciousness; the watersare the outpouring of the luminous movement and impulse of the divine or supramentalexistence.4 Swar, the world of divine solar light to which we have to ascend and which is revealed

by the release of the luminous herds from the nether cave and the consequent uprisingof the divine Sun.

The Fifteenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE DIVINE UPHOLDERAND CONQUEROR

[The Rishi hymns the Divine Will as the Seer and the MightyOne, the upholder of the Bliss and the Truth, by which men at-tain to the supreme-seated godheads. He breaks leonine throughan army of opposers, sees and confirms for man all the possiblebirths and manifestations of the soul, forms in him the secretsuperconscient plane and by knowledge delivers him into thatvast beatitude.]

v�Ds� kvy� v�%Ay Egr� Br� yfs� p� 4yA'y G� t s�o as� r� s� f�vo rAyo DtA' DzZo v�vo aE�n� � ��

1. To the Seer and Ordainer who is the object of knowledgeI bring the offering of the Word, to the glorious and vic-torious, to the pristine and supreme. He is the MightyOne accomplished in joy who goes forward to the clarities,the strength that is holder of the bliss and holder of thesubstance.

!t�n !t� DzZ� DAryt y��y fAk� prm� 4yomn� Edvo Dm'n� DzZ� s�d� qo n6 RAt�rjAtA& aEB y� nn0� � � ��

2. By the Truth they uphold the Truth that holds all, in thepower of the Sacrifice, in the supreme ether, even they whoby the godheads born in them travel to the godheads un-born, to the Powers who are seated for ever in the Law thatupholds the heavens.

Hymns to Agni 441

a�hoy� v�tv�tvt� Ev vyo mhd� d� �Vr� p� 4yA'y s s�vto nvjAt�t� t� yA't� Es�h� n +� d� DmEBt� pEr �W� � � ��

3. Putting evil away from them they create wide-extendedforms and embodiments of the soul that are a vast birthand indestructible manifestation for this first and supremegodhead; new-born he shall break through armies that joinlike converging floods; they stand encompassing him likehunters who enring an angry lion.

mAt�v yd� Brs� p TAno jn�jn� DAys� c0s� c vyovyo jrs� yd� dDAn� pEr �mnA Evq� #po EjgAEs � ��

4. Thou art even as a mother when in thy wideness thou bearestin thy arms birth after birth to the firm foundation and tothe vision. When thou holdest in thee and enjoyest mani-festation after manifestation, thou movest abroad with thyself in many different forms.

vAjo n� t� fvs�pA�vtm� z� doG� DzZ� d�v rAy� pd� n tAy� g�'hA dDAno mho rAy� Ecty�E�m�p� � "�

5. May our plenitude possess the furthest limit of thy might, Ogodhead, where in its wideness and all-yielding abundanceit upholds the bliss. Thou art he that forms and upholds inhimself that secret abode to which we move; by thy awak-ening of him into knowledge thou hast rescued the enjoyerof things for a vast beatitude.

The Sixteenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN TO THE BRINGER OF ALL DESIRABLE GOOD

[The Rishi affirms the Divine Will in man as the offering andrepresentative priest who brings light and strength and inspiredknowledge and every desirable good; for he is the aspirer byworks in whom is the puissance of all the gods and the fullplenitude of their force.]

b� hd� vyo Eh BAnv��cA' d�vAyA�ny� y� Em�� n fE�tEBm'tA'so dEDr� p� r� � ��

1. Sing thou out by the word a vast manifestation for the shin-ing Light, for the divine, for the Will whom mortals by theirexpressions of his godhead as the Friend1 put in their front.

s Eh %� EBj'nAnA� hotA d0�y bAh� vo� Ev h4ymE�nrAn� q�Bgo n vArm� vEt � ��

2. The Will is the priest of offering of the peoples; by theilluminations of the discerning mind he bears abroad inboth his arms the continuous order2 of their offerings andas the divine enjoyer3 he moves to his good.

1 Mitra. Agni contains and is all the gods. Mortals have to discover in the action of thedivine Will the light, love and harmony of the true knowledge and true existence, theMitra-power; it is in this aspect that he has to be set in front of the human consciousnessas the representative priest in the sacrifice.2 As the Purohit, the representative priest in the sacrifice and the leader in the van of

its march. He stands in front of our consciousness, leader of all our powers, to guideand carry on our Godward work, so that there shall be no interruption, no gap in theorder of the sacrifice, the right stages of its march to the gods, the right placing of itsworks according to the times and seasons of the Truth.3 The Divine Will becomes the Enjoyer Bhaga, brother power of Mitra, who enjoys

all delight of existence but by Mitra’s power of pure discernment and according to thelight, truth and harmony of the divine living.

Hymns to Agni 443

a�y �tom� mGon� sHy� v� d� DfoEcq� Ev�vA yE�mn� t� Ev�vEZ smy�' f� �mmAdD� � � ��

3. In the affirmation of him and in his comradeship when hehas increased his flame of purity are all the lords of theplenitude;4 for all things are in the sound of his many voicesand on him, the aspirer in his works, they have laid theburden of their strength.

aDA |�n eqA� s� vFy'�y m�hnA tEmd� yh� v� n rodsF pEr )vo bB� vt� � � ��

4. Even now, O Will, may there be the full plenitude of theirutter force. Around this mighty Will earth and heaven havebecome as if one voice of inspired knowledge.5

n� n eEh vAy'm�n� g� ZAn aA Br y� vy� y� c s� ry� �vE�t DAmh� scot�ED p� �s� no v� D� � "�

5. Even now come to us, O Will, hymned by our words andbring to us our desirable good. May we who are here andthose luminous masters of knowledge together found thatblissful state of our being. March with us in our battles thatwe may grow.

4 The gods; the Divine Force contains and sustains all the other divine powers in theirworking; in him resides therefore the power of all the other godheads.5 The whole physical and the whole mental consciousness become full of the knowledge

which streams into them from the supramental plane and they, as it were, turn into thesupramental light and action around the divine Seer-Will as he moves about in them athis work of transfiguration.

The Seventeenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF ENLARGEMENTAND ULTIMATE ASPIRATION

[A state arrives in which man goes beyond the mere subtlety andfineness of the intelligence and reaches to a rich and manifoldlargeness of soul. Even then though he has now the wide lawof his being which is our right foundation, he needs a forcegreater than his to lead him; for largeness and multiplicity ofsoul-force and knowledge are not enough, there must be thedivine truth in thought, word and act. For we have to attainbeyond the enlarged mental being to the beatitude of a statebeyond mind. Agni has the light and the force, the Word andthe true impulsion, the embracing knowledge and the achievingpower. He shall bring the divine wealth in his chariot and carryus towards the blissful state and the supreme good.]

aA y��d�'v m�y' i�TA t4yA�sm� ty� aE�n� k� t� �v2vr� p� zrF1FtAvs� � ��

1. I am mortal who call thee, O godhead, for thy strengthis greater than mine and it is righteous in its acts. Let theman of multiple soul when he has made perfect his sacrifice,adore the Will for his increasing.

a�y Eh �vyf�tr aAsA EvDm'n� mys� t� nAk� Ec�foEcq� md�� pro mnFqyA � ��

2. Man, thou who hast won to the wide law of thy being,1 by

1 The larger working of consciousness and power in the being by which the rigidlimitations of the ordinary mind and life and physical being are broken and man is ableto experience a full inner life and open himself to communication with all the planes ofhis own and of the cosmic existence.

Hymns to Agni 445

the mouth of this flame thou shalt be self-mightier to attainand shalt mentalise the paradise of his richest flamings, theparadise of rapture beyond the thought of the mind.2

a�y vAsA u aEc'qA y aAy� /t t� jA EgrA Edvo n y�y r�tsA b� hQCoc�yc'y� � ��

3. For by the mouth and radiance of his flame he has yokedhimself with the impelling force and the word, and vast asif with the seed of heaven blazes out the purity of his rays.

a�y +�vA Evc�tso d�m�y vs� rT aA aDA Ev�vAs� h4yo�E�nEv'0� f�yt� � ��

4. Because by the force of his workings he has the embracingknowledge and the achieving power, his chariot carries adivine wealth; therefore in all creatures he is the godhead tobe expressed and the helper to whom men call.

n� n iEd� D vAy'mAsA sct s� ry� Ujo' npAdEB�Vy� pAEh fE�D �v�ty ut�ED p� �s� no v� D� � "�

5. Even now and even for us may the luminous masters ofknowledge be firm by the mouth of the flame to our supremegood.3 O Son of Energy, guard us so that we may enter in,be mighty to attain our blissful state. March with us in ourbattles that we may grow.

2 The state of bliss of which Swar, the supramental plane of existence, is the basis.3 The luminous gods in us must keep our consciousness firmly attached to the light

and truth that is brought by the workings of the Will so that we may not fall away fromthe right movement and its divine joy.

The Eighteenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE LORDS OF THE PLENITUDE

[The Divine Will is invoked to complete the manifestation ofthe divine powers after the second state of the soul when it haspassed beyond the mere physical being and is full of the perfectenergy of the vital plane; for the gods have given all the life’sfifty steeds of swiftness, Agni is there as the light and flame ofits far-extended existence which has broken the limitations ofthe material being and he is full of the joys of this new andrich supra-physical life. Now the third state, the free mentalbeing, is to be perfected by a richly varied and luminous playof thought and word ending in the manifestation of the highestreach of the mental realms, the power of the supramental Lightin the mentality; there begins the manifestation of the intuitiveand inspired mind. Agni has to create that vastness and lightand divinity of the Truth-knowledge and so crown with it thealready attained free swiftness of force and wide range of lifeand enjoyment proper to the perfected and god-filled vitality.]

AtrE�n� p� zE yo Evf� �tv�tAEtET� Ev�vAEn yo am�yo' h4yA mt�'q� r yEt � ��

1. Let the Will be affirmed in the dawning,1 guest of the crea-ture with his many delights who, immortal in mortals, takesjoy in all their offerings.

E�tAy m� /tvAhs� �v�y d0�y m�hnA id�� s D� aAn� qk� �totA Ect� t� am�y' � ��

1 The dawning of the divine Dawn of the higher knowledge in the mind.

Hymns to Agni 447

2. He is the plenitude of his own discerning mind for the secondsoul2 when it bears the purified intelligence; then it holdsin itself the continual wine of delight and affirms thee, OImmortal.

t� vo dFGA'y� foEcq� EgrA h� v� mGonAm� aEr�Vo y�qA� rTo 4y�vdAv�Fyt� � ��

3. Such art thou I call, the pure flame of this far-extending ex-istence for the lords of the plenitude whose chariot inviolateranges wide,3 O giver of the steeds of swiftness, —

Ec�A vA y�q� dFEDEtrAs�� /TA pAEt y� �tFZ: bEh'� �vZ'r� )vA�Es dEDr� pEr � ��

4. The lords of the plenitude in whom is rich light of thethought and they keep the words of our utterance in theirmouth;4 the fullness of the soul has been spread as a seatof sacrifice in the power5 of the luminous world and all itsinspirations are set round about.

y� m� p`Aft� dd� r�vAnA� sD�t� Et %� md�n� mEh )vo b� ht� k� ED mGonA� n� vdm� t n� ZAm� � "�

2 Dwita, the god or Rishi of the second plane of the human ascent. It is that of theLife-force, the plane of fulfilled force, desire, free range of the vital powers which are nolonger limited by the strict limitations of this mould of Matter. We become conscious ofand conscious in new realms, immense ranges of life, the “far-extending existence” ofthe next verse, which are screened off from our ordinary physical consciousness. Tritais the god or Rishi of the third plane, full of luminous mental kingdoms unknown to thephysical mind.3 In these new worlds of life the divine movement is now fulfilled there and ranges

unpierced by the “harms” of the powers of Death and Darkness.4 This verse describes the farther ascent of the movement from the realms of Dwita to

the realms of Trita.5 Swarnara, often spoken of as if it were a country; it is not Swar itself, the utter

superconscient plane, but the power of itself which the light of that world forms inthe pure mentality. Here its inspirations and illuminations descend and take their placeround the seat of the sacrifice. These are elsewhere called the scouts, “eclaireurs”, of thesolar Deity, Varuna.


5. They who have given me fifty steeds of swiftness6 with aperfect affirming, the divine souls that are lords of the pleni-tude, for them, O Flame-Immortal, create the large, the vast,the luminous knowledge full of the godheads.

6 The Ashwa or Horse is the symbol of the Life-Force as the Cow is the symbol of theLight. Fifty, hundred, a thousand are numbers symbolic of completeness.

The Nineteenth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE REVEALING RAYAND CONQUERING WILL

[That epiphany of the soul is sung in which all the coverings ofits higher states are penetrated and open to the divine light. Itis the opening of the whole third plane of our existence whichwas before as a fortified city with its gates closed to the soulembodied in Matter. By this new action of the Divine Force themental and physical consciousness are wedded to the high supra-mental which was till now separated from them and the life-forceblazing in its works with the heat of the divine Sun is harmonisedwith the play of the sun-ray of the divine knowledge.]

a�yv�TA� jAyt� vv��v'Ev�E�ck�t up�T� mAt� Ev' c�V� � ��

1. State upon state is born, covering upon covering opens toconsciousness of knowledge; in the lap of its Mother1 thesoul sees.2

j� h� r� Ev Ectyto�EnEmq� n� MZ� pAEt aA d� �hA� p� r� EvEvf� � � ��

2. Awakened to an embracing knowledge men cast in thee theoffering, they guard a sleepless manhood, they enter intothe fortified city.

aA �v��y�y jtvo %� md� vD't k� �Vy� En�kg�Fvo b� hd� /T enA m2vA n vAjy� � � ��

1 Aditi, the infinite consciousness, Mother of all things.2 With the all-embracing vision of the supramental infinite consciousness.


3. Men who are born in the world and labour at the workincrease the luminous state of the son of the white-shiningMother,3 he wears the golden necklace,4 he utters the vastword; with that and with the honey wine of delight hebecomes a seeker of the plenitude.

E y� d� �D� n kAMymjAEm jAMyo� scA Gmo' n vAjjWro�dND� f�vto dB� � ��

4. He is as the delightful and desirable yield of the Mother,5

he is that which being without a fellow6 yet dwells with thetwo companions, he is the heat of the Light and the belly ofthe plenitude, he is the eternal unconquerable who tramplesall things under his feet.

+F1n� no r�m aA B� v� s� B�mnA vAy� nA v�EvdAn� tA a�y sn� D� qjo n Et�mA� s� s�EftA v�yo v0Z��TA� � "�

5. O Ray, be born in us and dwell there at play harmonisingthy knowledge with the blazing life-god.7 May these flamesof the will that bear our works be violent and keen andsharpened to a perfect intensity and firmly founded in theBearer of all things.

3 Aditi; her dark state or black form is Diti, mother of the powers of Darkness.4 Of the rays of the divine Sun of Truth.5 The milk of the Cow, Aditi.6 The all-creating and self-sufficing Supermind high and remote and separated in our

consciousness from the mental and physical planes; yet it is really there behind theiraction and reaction upon each other and in the liberated state of man the separation isabolished.7 Vayu.

The Twentieth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE WORK AND THE ATTAINMENT

[The Rishi desires a state of spiritual wealth full of the divineworking in which nothing shall fall away to the division and thecrookedness. So, increasing by our works the divine Force in usdaily, we shall attain to the Bliss and the Truth, the rapture ofthe Light and the rapture of the Force.]

ym�n� vAjsAtm �v� Ecn� mys� rEym� t� no gFEB'� )vA�y� d�v�A pnyA y� jm� � ��

1. O Will, O conqueror of our plenitude, the felicity whichthou alone canst conceive in the mind, that make full ofinspiration by our words and set it to labour in the gods asour helper.

y� a�n� n�ryEt t� v� d� DA ug��y fvs� ap ��qo ap h� vro�yv�t�y sE�cr� � ��

2. They who are powers increased of thee in the fierceness ofthy flame and strength, yet impel us not on the path, theyfall away to the division, they cleave to the crookedness ofa law that is other than thine.

hotAr� �vA v� ZFmh��n� d0�y sADnm� y��q� p� 4y: EgrA y�vto hvAmh� � ��

3. Thee, O Will, we take to us as the priest of the offering andthe accomplisher of a discerning knowledge; holding forthee all our delights we call thee the ancient and supreme toour sacrifices by the word;


i�TA yTA t Uty� shsAvn� Edv�Edv� rAy !tAy s� +to goEB� �yAm sDmAdo

vFr�� yAm sDmAd� � ��

4. Rightly and in such wise that, O forceful god, O perfectpower of works, we may increase thee day by day, that wemay have the Bliss, that we may have the Truth, that we mayhave perfect rapture by the Rays of the knowledge, that wemay have perfect rapture by the Heroes of the Force.

The Twenty-First Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE DIVINE FLAME IN HUMANITY

[The Rishi invokes the divine Flame to burn as the divine Manin humanity and to raise us to our perfection in the seats of theTruth and the Bliss.]

mn� �vt� �vA En DFmEh mn� �vt� sEmDFmEh a�n� mn� �vdEYro d�vAn� d�vyt� yj � ��

1. As the human1 we set thee within us, as the human wekindle thee; O Flame, O Seer-Puissance, as the human offersacrifice to the gods for the seeker of the godheads.

�v� Eh mAn� q� jn��n� s� Ft i2ys� 5� c��vA y�yAn� qk� s� jAt sEp'rAs� t� � ��

2. O Flame, thou burnest in the human creature when thou artsatisfied with his offerings; his ladles go to thee unceasingly,O perfect in thy birth, O presser out of the running richness.

�vA� Ev�v� sjoqso d�vAso d� tm+t spy't��vA kv� y��q� d�vmF1t� � ��

3. Thee all the gods with one heart of love made their envoy;O seer, men serve and adore thee in their sacrifices as thegodhead.

1 The godhead descending into man assumes the veil of humanity. The god is eternallyperfect, unborn, fixed in the Truth and Joy; descending, he is born in man, grows,gradually manifests his completeness, attains as if by battle and difficult progress to theTruth and Joy. Man is the thinker, the god is the eternal seer; but the Divine veils hisseerhood in the forms of thought and life to assist the development of the mortal intoimmortality.


d�v� vo d�vy?yyA�E�nmF1Ft m�y'� sEmd� D� f� + dFEdEh !t�y yoEnmAsd�

ss�y yoEnmAsd� � ��

4. Let mortal man adore the Will, the divine, by sacrifice tothe powers divine; but thou, O Brightness, shine out high-kindled; enter into the home of the Truth, enter into thehome of the Bliss.

The Twenty-Second Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE JOURNEY TO THE PERFECT JOY

[Man, the eater of things, seeks a fulfilment of his desires in afinal equality of delight. To this end he has to be purified by thedivine Flame, the Seer-Will who holds in himself the consciousvision and the utter rapture. By increasing him in us we shalljourney forward with our progressing sacrifice and the gods willutterly manifest themselves. We must entertain this divine Forceas the master of our house, our physical and mental body, andgive it all the objects of our enjoyment as its food.]

Ev�vsAm�E�vdcA' pAvkfoEcq� yo a2vr��vF�o hotA md� tmo EvEf � ��

1. Man who seekest thy equal fulfilment in all, sing as theenjoyer of things the word of illumination to him of thebright purifying flame, to the object of our adoration in themarch of our sacrifices, to the priest of the offering mostrapturous in the creature.

yE�n� jAtv�ds� dDAtA d�vm� E�vjm� y� e�vAn� qg%A d�v4yc�tm� � ��

2. Set within thee Will that knows all the births, the divinesacrificer in the seasons; today let thy sacrifice march for-ward unceasingly, thy sacrifice shall open to thee the wholeepiphany of the godheads.

EcEkE�vmns� �vA d�v� mtA's Uty� vr� y�y t��vs iyAnAso ammEh � ��


3. Mortals, we have set our mind on thee the divine, for thouhast the mind of conscious vision; we meditate on thee aswe journey, that we may increase and for the increase tooof thee, the supremely desirable.

a�n� EcEkd� 2y�y n id� vc� sh�y t� �vA s� Ef d�pt� �tom�v'D'�y�yo gFEB'� f� MB�y�y� � ��

4. Awake then, O Will, to the vision of this within us; this isour word to thee, O Lord of Force. Strong-jawed enjoyer,master of our house, the eaters of things increase thee bytheir affirmations and by their words they make thee a thingof bright gladness.

The Twenty-Third Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE RICH AND CONQUERING SOUL

[The Rishi desires through Agni that opulence of the divineLight against which the armies of darkness cannot stand; for itoverpowers them by its plenitude and force. This it does on allthe successive planes of the soul’s labour and in each of themman gets, by this divine Force that is the true and transcendentBeing, all the objects of his desire that they contain.]

a�n� shtmA Br %� 7�y AshA rEym� Ev�vA y�cq'ZFr�yAsA vAj�q� sAsht� � ��

1. Bring to us, O Strength most forcefully prevailing, thatforceful opulence of the Light which in all the fields of ourlabour shall by force prevail with thy mouth of flame toenter into the plenitudes.

tm�n� p� tnAqh� rEy� sh�v aA Br �v� Eh s�yo a\� to dAtA vAj�y gomt� � ��

2. O Flame, O Might, that rich felicity bring which shall vio-lently overpower the armies that are embattled against us;for thou art the true in being, the transcendent and wonder-ful, who gives to man the luminous plenitude.

Ev�v� Eh �vA sjoqso jnAso v� /tbEh'q� hotAr� s�s� E y� 4yEt vAyA' p� z � ��

3. All these peoples who with one heart of love have made


clear their seat of sacrifice, find in the dwelling-places1 ofthe soul thee, the priest of sacrifice, the beloved, and theyreach in them their many objects of desire.

s Eh �mA Ev�vcq'EZrEBmAEt sho dD� a�n eq� 0y��vA r�v�� f� + dFEdEh %� mt� pAvk dFEdEh � ��

4. This is the labourer in all man’s works and he holds inhimself an all-besieging force. O pure-brilliant Flame, shineout full of joy and opulence in these our habitations, shineout full of light, O our purifier.

1 The “seats” or homes of the soul, which progresses from plane to plane and makesof each a habitation. They are sometimes called the cities. There are seven such planeseach with its seven provinces and one additional above. Usually we hear of a hundredcities, the double number perhaps representing the downward gaze in each of the Soulupon Nature and the upward aspiration of Nature to the Soul.

The Twenty-Fourth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN TO THE DELIVERER AND PROTECTOR

[The Rishi invokes the Divine Will for protection from evil andfor the fullness of the divine light and substance.]

a�n� �v� no atm ut �AtA Efvo BvA v#Ly� vs� rE�nv's� )vA aQCA nE0 %� m�m� rEy� dA� � ��

1-2. O Will, become our inmost inmate, become auspicious to us,become our deliverer and our armour of protection. Thouwho art the lord of substance and who of that substancehast the divine knowledge, come towards us, give us itsmost luminous opulence.

s no boED )� DF hvm� z�yA Zo aGAyt� sm�mAt� t� �vA foEc�W dFEdv� s� 7Ay n� nmFmh� sEK�y� � ��

3-4. Awake! hear our call! keep us far from all that seeks to turnus to evil. O shining One, O flame of purest Light, thee forour comrades we desire that even now they may have thebliss and peace.

The Twenty-Fifth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN TO THE LORD OF LIGHTAND CREATOR OF GODHEAD

[The Rishi hymns Agni as the Seer-Will whose whole being isthe light and the truth and the lavishing of the substance ofdivinity. He is the son born to the thought of the seers and hegives himself as the godhead born in man who is the son of ourworks opulent with the divine Truth and the divine Power andas the conquering steed of the journey and the battle. The wholemovement of the Seer-Will is upward to the light and vastness ofthe superconscient; his voice is as if the thunder-chant of thoseheavens. He shall carry us by his perfect working beyond thesiege of darkness and limitation.]

aQCA vo aE�nmvs� d�v� gAEs s no vs� � rAst� p� � !q� ZAm� tAvA pq'Et E�q� � ��

1. Raise thy song towards the Will, towards the divine for thyincreasing, for he is our lord of substance and he lavishes;he is the son of the seekers of knowledge; he is the keeper ofthe Truth who ferries us beyond the surge of our destroyers.

s Eh s�yo y� p� v�' Ecd� d�vAsE�c%mFEDr� hotAr� md� Ejh� vEmt� s� dFEtEBEv'BAvs� m� � ��

2. This is the true in his being whom the seers of old kindled,yea, the gods too kindled him with perfect outshinings intohis wide substance of the light, the priest of the oblationwith his tongue of ecstasy.

Hymns to Agni 461

s no DFtF vEr�WyA )��WyA c s� m�yA a�n� rAyo EddFEh n� s� v� E/tEBv'r� y � ��

3. O Flame supremely desirable, so by our supreme thinking,by our brightest perfected mentality, by its utter cleavingaway of all evil let thy light give unto us the bliss.

aE�nd�'v�q� rAj�yE�nm't�'�vAEvfn� aE�nno' h4yvAhno�E�n� DFEB� spy't � ��

4. The Will is that which shines out in the gods, the Will isthat which enters with its light into mortals, the Will is thecarrier of our oblation; the Will seek and serve in all yourthoughts.

aE�n�t� Ev)v�tm� t� Evb�LAZm� �mm� at� t: )Avy�pEt� p� �� ddAEt dAf� q� � "�

5. The Will gives to the giver of sacrifice the Son1 born of hisworks who teems with the many inspirations and the manyvoices of the soul, the highest, the unassailable, the Masterof things who opens our ears to the knowledge.

aE�nd'dAEt s�pEt� sAsAh yo y� DA n� EB� aE�nr�y� rG� �yd� j�tArmprAEjtm� � (�

6. Yea, ’tis the Will gives to us the Lord of existences whoconquers in the battle by his souls of power; Will gives tous our swift-galloping steed of battle ever conquering, neverconquered.

yd� vAEh�W� td�ny� b� hdc' EvBAvso mEhqFv �vd� rEy��vd� vAjA udFrt� � *�

1 The Son of the sacrifice is a constant image in the Veda. Here it is the godheadhimself, Agni who gives himself as a son to man, a Son who delivers his father. Agni isalso the War-Horse and the steed of the journey, the White Horse, the mystic gallopingDadhikravan who carries us through the battle to the goal of our voyaging.


7. That which is strongest in us to upbear, we give it to theWill. Sing out the Vast, O thou whose wide substance is itslight. Thy opulence is as if the largeness of the Goddess2

herself; upward is the rush of thy plenitudes.

tv %� mto ac'yo g�Av�voQyt� b� ht� uto t� tyt� y'TA �vAno at' �mnA Edv� � ,�

8. Luminous are thy flaming radiances; there rises from thee avast utterance like the voice of the pressing-stone of delight;yea, thy cry of itself rises up like a thunder-chant from theheavens.

evA& aE�n� vs� yv� shsAn� vvEdm s no Ev�vA aEt E�q� pq'�Av�v s� +t� � � -�

9. Thus, desiring substance, we adore the Will who is forcefulto conquer. May he who has the perfect power of his work-ings, carry us beyond all the forces that seek to destroy us,like a ship over the waters.

2 Aditi, the vast Mother.

The Twenty-Sixth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE PRIEST AND SACRIFICIAL FLAME

[The Rishi invokes the Divine Flame in all its usual attributes asthe sacrificer, the luminous seer who has the vision of the lumi-nous world, the bringer of the gods, the carrier of the offering,the envoy, conqueror, increaser of the divine workings in man,the knower of the Births, the leader of the march of the sacrificewith its progressive epiphany of the godheads.]

a�n� pAvk roEcqA md� yA d�v Ejh� vyA aA d�vAn� vE0 yE0 c � ��

1. O Flame, O purifier, bring to us by thy tongue of rapture,O god, the gods and offer to them sacrifice.

t� �vA G� t�vFmh� Ec�BAno �vd�'fm� d�vA& aA vFty� vh � ��

2. Thou who drippest the clarity, thou of the rich and variedluminousness, we desire thee because thou hast the visionof our world of the Truth. Bring to us the gods for theirmanifesting.1

vFEtho�� vA kv� %� mt� sEmDFmEh a�n� b� htm2vr� � ��

3. O Seer, we kindle thee in thy light and thy vastness in themarch of our sacrifice who carriest the offerings on theirjourney.

1 Or “for the journeying” to the luminous world of the Truth, or “for the eating” ofthe oblations.


a�n� Ev�v�EBrA gEh d�v�EBh'4ydAty� hotAr� �vA v� ZFmh� � ��

4. Come, O Will, with all the godheads for the giving of theoblation; thee we accept as the priest of the offering.

yjmAnAy s� vt aA�n� s� vFy: vh d�v�rA sE�s bEh'Eq � "�

5. For the sacrificer who presses the wine of his delight, bring,O Flame, a perfect energy. Sit with the gods on the seat ofthe soul’s fullness.

sEmDAn� sh5Ejd�n� DmA'EZ p� �yEs d�vAnA& d� t u/Ly� � (�

6. O Flame, thou burnest high and increasest the divine lawsand art the conqueror of a thousandfold riches; thou art themessenger of the gods who hast the word.

yE�n� jAtv�ds� ho�vAh� yEv��m� dDAtA d�vm� E�vjm� � *�

7. Set within you the Flame who knows the births, bearer ofthe offering, youngest vigour, divine sacrificer in the seasonsof the Truth.

y� e�vAn� qg%A d�v4yc�tm� �t� ZFt bEh'rAsd� � ,�

8. Today let thy sacrifice march forward unceasingly, thy sac-rifice that shall bring the whole epiphany of the godheads.Strew the seat of thy soul that there they may sit.

ed� mzto aE�vnA Em�� sFdt� vzZ� d�vAs� sv'yA EvfA � -�

Hymns to Agni 465

9. There let the Life-powers2 take their seat and the Riders ofthe Horse3 and the Lord of Love4 and the Lord of Wideness,5

even the gods with all their nation.

2 The Maruts.3 The twin Ashwins.4 Mitra.5 Varuna.

The Twenty-Seventh Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE STRENGTH AND ILLUMINATION

[The Rishi under the figure of the demigod, Traivrishna TryarunaTrasadasyu, and the seer Ashwamedha, symbolises the fulfilmentin the human mentality of the illumination of the God-MindIndra, and the power of the God-Will, Agni, in the vitality. TheMind-Soul, destroyer of the demons, awakened to knowledge asthe human-born Indra, has given to the seer his two cows of lightthat draw his wain, his two shining horses that draw his chariotand the ten times twelve cows of the dawn of knowledge. He hasassented to and confirmed the desire with which the Life-Soulhas given the sacrifice of the Life-Horse to the gods. The Rishiprays that this Mind-Soul, lord of the triple dawn, may give tothe journeying Life that seeks the truth, the mental intelligenceand power of possession needed and may itself in return receivefrom Agni the peace and bliss. The Life-Soul on the other handhas given the hundred powers, the vital strength needed for theupward journey; the Rishi prays that this Life-Soul may attainto that vast strength which is the power of the Sun of Truth onthe superconscient plane.]

an�vtA s�pEtmA'mh� m� gAvA c�Et�Wo as� ro mGon� ��v� �Zo a�n� dfEB� sh5�v�'�vAnr {yzZE�ck�t � ��

1. O Will, O Universal Power,1 the mighty One supreme invision, master of his being, lord of his plenitudes has givenme his two cows of the Light that draw his wain. He of

1 Or, Godhead.

Hymns to Agni 467

the triple dawn, son of the triple Bull,2 has awakened toknowledge with the ten thousands3 of his plenitude.

yo m� ftA c Ev�fEt� c gonA� hrF c y� /tA s� D� rA ddAEt v��vAnr s� �V� to vAv� DAno��n� yQC {yzZAy fm' � ��

2. He gives to me the hundred and twenty4 of the cows ofdawn; his two shining5 horses he gives, yoked to the car,that bear aright the yoke. O Will, O Universal Power, dothou rightly affirmed and increasing extend peace and blissto the lord of the triple dawn.

evA t� a�n� s� mEt� ckAno nEv�WAy nvm� �sd�y� � yo m� Egr�t� EvjAt�y p� vF'y�'/t�nAEB {yzZo g� ZAEt � ��

3. For thus has he done desiring thy grace of mind, new-givenfor him new-manifested, — he, the disperser of the destroy-ers,6 the lord of the triple dawn who with attentive mindgives response to the many words of my many births.7

2 The Triple Bull is Indra, lord of the three luminous realms of Swar, the Divine Mind;Tryaruna Trasadasyu is the half-god, man turned into the Indra type; therefore he isdescribed by all the usual epithets of Indra, “Asura”, “Satpati”, “Maghavan”. Thetriple dawn is the dawn of these three realms on the human mentality.3 Thousand symbolises absolute completeness, but there are ten subtle powers of the

illumined mind each of which has to have its entire plenitude.4 The symbolic figure of the illuminations of divine knowledge as the series of dawns

(cows) of the twelve months of the year and twelve periods of the sacrifice. There areagain ten times twelve to correspond to the ten subtle sisters, powers of the illuminedmentality.5 The two shining horses of Indra identical probably with the two cows of light of

the first verse; they are the two vision-powers of the supramental Truth-consciousness,right-hand and left-hand, probably direct truth-discernment and intuition. As cowssymbolising light of knowledge they yoke themselves to the material mind, the wain;as horses symbolising power of knowledge to the chariot of Indra, the liberated puremind.6 Trasadasyu; in all things he reproduces the characteristics of Indra.7 The seer by this self-fulfilment on the higher plane is born, as it were, into many

realms of consciousness and from each of these there go up its words that express theimpulses in it which seek a divine fulfilment. The Mind-Soul answers to these and givesassent, it supplies to the word of expression the answering word of illumination and tothe Life that seeks the Truth it gives the power of intelligence that finds and holds theTruth.


yo m iEt voc�y�vm�DAys� ry� ddd� cA sEn� yt� ddm�DAm� tAyt� � ��

4. May he who answers to me with assent give to the illuminedgiver of the Horse-sacrifice,8 by the word of illuminationpossession of the goal of his journey; may he give power ofintelligence to the seeker of the Truth.

y�y mA pzqA� ftm� d� Dq'y�y� 0Z� a�vm�D�y dAnA� somA iv {yAEfr� � "�

5. A hundred strong bulls of the diffusion9 raise me up to joy;the gifts of the sacrificer of the steed are as outpourings ofthe wine of delight with their triple infusions.10

id� A�nF ftdA4y�vm�D� s� vFy'm� 0�� DAryt� b� hd� EdEv s� y'EmvAjrm� � (�

6. May the God-Mind and the God-Will uphold in the sacrifi-cer of the Horse and giver of his hundred a perfect energyand a vast force of battle even as in heaven the Sun of Lightindestructible.11

8 The Horse-sacrifice is the offering of the Life-power with all its impulses, desires,enjoyments to the divine existence. The Life-soul (Dwita) is itself the giver of this sacrificewhich it performs when by the power of Agni it attains to vision on its own vital plane,when it becomes, in the figure of the hymn, the illumined seer Ashwamedha.9 The complete hundred powers of the Life by whom all the abundance of the vital

plane is showered upon the growing man. The vital forces being the instrument of desireand enjoyment, this diffusion is like the outpouring of the wine of delight that raises thesoul to new and intoxicating joys.10 The delight extracted from existence is typified by the honey wine of the Soma; it ismixed with the milk, the curds and the grain, the milk being that of the luminous cows,the curds the fixation of their yield in the intellectual mind and the grain the formulationof the light in the force of the physical mind. These symbolic senses are indicated by thedouble meaning of the words used, go, dadhi and yava.11 Perfect and vast energy in the vital being corresponding to the infinite and immortallight of the Truth in the mental being.

The Twenty-Eighth Hymn to Agni

A HYMN OF THE HIGH-BLAZING FLAME,KING OF IMMORTALITY

[The Rishi celebrates the flame of the Will high-blazing in thedawn of knowledge as the King of Immortality, the giver tothe soul of its spiritual riches and felicity and of a well-governedmastery of Nature. He is the bearer of our oblation, the illuminedguide of our sacrifice to its divine and universal goal.]

sEmd� Do aE�nEd'Ev foEcr)�t� �y�� qsm� Ev'yA Ev BAEt eEt AcF Ev�vvArA nmoEBd�'vA& I1AnA hEvqA G� tAcF � ��

1. The Flame of Will burning high rises to his pure light in theheaven of mind; wide he extends his illumination and frontsthe Dawn. She comes, moving upward, laden with all de-sirable things, seeking the gods with the oblation, luminouswith the clarity.

sEm2ymAno am� t�y rAjEs hEv�k� vt� scs� �v�ty� Ev�v� s D�� d� EvZ� yEmv�yAEtLym�n� En c D� it� p� r� � ��

2. When thou burnest high thou art king of immortality andthou cleavest to the doer of sacrifice to give him that blissfulstate; he to whom thou comest to be his guest, holds inhimself all substance and he sets thee within in his front.

a�n� fD' mht� sOBgAy tv %� 7Ay� �mAEn st� s� jA�p�y� s� ymmA k� Z� �v f�� ytAmEB Et�WA mhA�Es � ��


3. O Flame, put forth thy battling might for a vast enjoyment1

of bliss, may there be thy highest illumination; create a well-governed union of the Lord and his Spouse, set thy foot onthe greatness of hostile powers.

sEmd� D�y mhso��n� vd� tv E)ym� v� qBo %� 7vA& aEs sm2vr�E�v2ys� � ��

4. I adore, O Flame, the glory of thy high-blazing mightiness.Thou art the Bull with the illuminations; thou burnest up inthe march of our sacrifices.

sEmd� Do a�n aAh� t d�vAn� yE0 �v2vr �v� Eh h4yvA1Es � "�

5. O Flame that receivest our offerings, perfect guide of thesacrifice, high-kindled offer our oblation to the godheads;for thou art the bearer of our offerings.

aA j� hotA d� v�ytA�E�n� y�y2vr� v� ZF2v� h4yvAhnm� � (�

6. Cast the offering, serve the Will with your works2 whileyour sacrifice moves forward to its goal, accept the carrierof our oblation.3

1 The Vedic immortality is a vast beatitude, a large enjoyment of the divine and infiniteexistence reposing on a perfect union between the Soul and Nature; the soul becomesKing of itself and its environment, conscious on all its planes, master of them, withNature for its bride delivered from divisions and discords into an infinite and luminousharmony.2 Or, set the Will to its workings.3 This hymn closes the series addressed to Agni and forming the first twenty-eight

hymns of the fifth Mandala of the Rig Veda.

Hymns to the Lords of Light

The Guardians of the Light

SURYA, LIGHT AND SEER

THE RIG VEDA rises out of the ancient Dawn with thesound of a thousand-voiced hymn lifted from the soul ofman to an all-creative Truth and an all-illumining Light.

Truth and Light are synonymous or equivalent words in thethought of the Vedic seers even as are their opposites, Darknessand Ignorance. The battle of the Vedic Gods and Titans is aperpetual conflict between Day and Night for the possessionof the triple world of heaven, mid-air and earth and for theliberation or bondage of the mind, life and body of the humanbeing, his mortality or his immortality. It is waged by the Powersof a supreme Truth and Lords of a supreme Light against otherdark Powers who struggle to maintain the foundation of thisfalsehood in which we dwell and the iron walls of these hundredfortified cities of the Ignorance.

This antinomy between the Light and the Darkness, theTruth and the Falsehood has its roots in an original cosmicantinomy between the illumined Infinite and the darkened finiteconsciousness. Aditi the infinite, the undivided is the mother ofthe Gods, Diti or Danu, the division, the separative conscious-ness the mother of the Titans; therefore the gods in man movetowards light, infinity and unity, the Titans dwell in their cave ofthe darkness and issue from it only to break up, make discordant,wounded, limited his knowledge, will, strength, joy and being.Aditi is originally the pure consciousness of infinite existence oneand self-luminous; she is the Light that is Mother of all things.As the infinite she gives birth to Daksha, the discriminating anddistributing Thought of the divine Mind, and is herself born toDaksha as the cosmic infinite, the mystic Cow whose uddersfeed all the worlds.


It is this divine daughter of Daksha who is the mother ofthe gods. In the cosmos Aditi is the undivided infinite unity ofthings, free from the duality, advaya, and has Diti the separa-tive dualising consciousness for the obverse side of her cosmiccreation, — her sister and a rival wife in the later myth. Here inthe lower being where she is manifested as the earth-principle,her husband is the lower or inauspicious Father who is slainby their child Indra, the power of the divine Mind manifestedin the inferior creation. Indra, says the hymn, slays his father,dragging him by the feet, and makes his mother a widow. Inanother image, forcible and expressive though repugnant to thedecorousness of our modern taste, Surya is said to be the loverof his sister Dawn and the second husband of his mother Aditi,and by a variation of the same image Aditi is hymned as thewife of the all-pervading Vishnu who is in the cosmic creationone of the sons of Aditi and the younger brother of Indra. Theseimages which seem gross and confused when we lack the key totheir mystic significance, become clear enough the moment thatis recovered. Aditi is the infinite consciousness in the cosmosespoused and held by the lower creative power which worksthrough the limited mind and body, but delivered from thissubjection by the force of the divine or illumined Mind bornof her in the mentality of man. It is this Indra who makes Suryathe light of the Truth rise in heaven and dispel the darknessesand falsehoods and limited vision of the separative mentality.Vishnu is the vaster all-pervading existence which then takespossession of our liberated and unified consciousness, but he isborn in us only after Indra has made his puissant and luminousappearance.

This Truth is the light, the body of Surya. It is describedas the True, the Right, the Vast; as the luminous supramentalheaven of Swar — “vast Swar, the great Truth” — concealed be-yond our heaven and our earth; and as Surya, the Sun, “thatTruth” which dwells lost in the darkness, withheld from us inthe secret cave of the subconscient. This hidden Truth is theVast because it dwells free and manifest only on the supramentalplane where existence, will, knowledge, joy move in a rapturous

The Guardians of the Light 475

and boundless infinity and are not limited and hedged as in thismany-walled existence of the mind, life and body which form thelower being. That is the wideness of the higher being to which wehave to ascend breaking beyond the two enclosing firmamentsof the mental and physical; it is described as a divine existencefree and large in its unbounded range; it is a wideness wherethere is no obstacle nor any siege of limitation; it is the fear-freepasture of the luminous herds of the Sun; it is the seat and houseof the Truth, the own home of the Gods, the solar world, thetrue light where there is no fear for the soul, no possibility ofany wound to the large and equal bliss of its existence.

This supramental vastness is also the fundamental truth ofbeing, satyam, out of which its active truth wells out naturallyand without strife of effort into a perfect and faultless movementbecause there is upon those heights no division, no gulf betweenconsciousness and force, no divorce of knowledge and will, nodisharmonising of our being and its action; everything there isthe “straight” and there is no least possibility of crookedness.Therefore this supramental plane of vastness and true being isalso Ritam, the true activity of things; it is a supreme truth ofmovement, action, manifestation, an infallible truth of will andheart and knowledge, a perfect truth of thought and word andemotion; it is the spontaneous Right, the free Law, the origi-nal divine order of things untouched by the falsehoods of thedivided and separative consciousness. It is the vast divine andself-luminous synthesis born of a fundamental unity, of whichour petty existence is only the poor, partial, broken and per-verted cutting up and analysis. Such was the Sun of the Vedicworship, the paradise of light to which the Fathers aspired, theworld, the body of Surya son of Aditi.

Aditi is the infinite Light of which the divine world is a for-mation and the gods, children of the infinite Light, born of her inthe Ritam, manifested in that active truth of her movement guardit against Chaos and Ignorance. It is they who maintain the in-vincible workings of the Truth in the universe, they who build itsworlds into an image of the Truth. They, bounteous givers, looseout upon man its floods variously imaged by the mystic poets


as the sevenfold solar waters, the rain of heaven, the streamsof the Truth, the seven mighty Ones of heaven, the waters thathave knowledge, the floods that breaking through the controlof Vritra the Coverer ascend and overflow the mind. They, seersand revealers, make the light of the Truth to arise on the dark-ened sky of his mentality, fill with its luminous and honey-sweetsatisfactions the atmosphere of his vital existence, transform intoits vastness and plenitude by the power of the Sun the earth ofhis physical being, create everywhere the divine Dawn.

Then are established in man the seasons of the Truth, thedivine workings, called sometimes the Aryan workings; the lawof the Truth seizes and guides his action, the word of the Truth isheard in his thought. Then appear the straight undeviating pathsof the Truth, the road and ford of Heaven, the way of going of thegods and of the fathers; for by this path where no violence is doneto the divine workings, straight, thornless, happy, easy to treadonce our feet are set upon it and the manifested divinities are ourguard, the luminous fathers ascended by the power of the Word,by the power of the Wine, by the power of the Sacrifice into thefearless light and stood upon the wide and open levels of thesupramental existence. So must man, their posterity, exchangethe crooked movements of the separative consciousness for thestraight things of the truth-conscious mind.

For always the courses of the Sun, the gallopings of thedivine horse Dadhikravan, the movement of the chariot-wheelsof the gods travel on the straight path over wide and level rangeswhere all is open and the vision is not confined; but the waysof the lower being are crooked windings beset with pits andstumbling-blocks and they crawl unvisited by the divine impul-sion over a rugged and uneven ground which screens in frommen their goal, their road, their possible helpers, the dangers thatawait them, their ambushed enemies. Travelling on the path ofthe Truth with the straight and perfect leading of the gods thelimitations of mind and body are at length transcended; we takepossession of the three luminous worlds of the higher heaven,enjoy the beatific immortality, grow into the epiphany of thegods and build in our human existence the universal formations


of the higher or divine creation. Man then possesses both thedivine and the human birth; he is lord of the double movement,he holds Aditi and Diti together, realises the universal in theindividual, becomes the Infinite in the finite.

It is this conception that Surya embodies. He is the lightof the Truth rising on the human consciousness in the wake ofthe divine Dawn whom he pursues as a lover follows after hisbeloved and he treads the paths she has traced for him. ForDawn the daughter of Heaven, the face or power of Aditi, is theconstant opening out of the divine light upon the human being;she is the coming of the spiritual riches, a light, a power, a newbirth, the pouring out of the golden treasure of heaven into hisearthly existence. Surya means the illumined or the luminous,as also the illumined thinker is called suri; but the root means,besides, to create or, more literally, to loose, release, speed forth,— for in the Indian idea creation is a loosing forth of what is heldback, a manifestation of what is hidden in the infinite Existence.Luminous vision and luminous creation are the two functionsof Surya. He is Surya the creator and he is Surya the revealingvision, the all-seer.

What does he create? First the worlds; for everything iscreated out of the burning light and truth of the infinite Being,loosed out of the body of Surya who is the light of His infiniteself-vision, formed by Agni, the seer-will, the omniscient creativeforce and flaming omnipotence of that self-vision. Secondly, intothe night of man’s darkened consciousness this Father of things,this Seer of the truth manifests out of himself in place of theinauspicious and inferior creation, which he then looses awayfrom us, the illimitable harmony of the divine worlds governedby the self-conscious supramental Truth and the living law of themanifested godhead. Still, the name Surya is seldom used whenthere is question of this creation; it is reserved for his passiveaspects as the body of the infinite Light and the revelation. In hisactive power he is addressed by other names; then he is Savitri,from the same root as Surya, the Creator; or he is Twashtrithe Fashioner of things; or he is Pushan, the Increaser, — ap-pellations that are sometimes used as if identical with Surya,


sometimes as if expressing other forms and even other personal-ities of this universal godhead. Savitri, again, manifests himself,especially in the formation of the Truth in man, through fourgreat and active deities Mitra, Varuna, Bhaga and Aryaman, theLords of pure Wideness, luminous Harmony, divine Enjoyment,exalted Power.

But if Surya is the creator, he who is, as the Veda says, the selfof all that moves and all that is stable, and if this Surya is also thedivine, “the wide-burning Truth that is lodged in the law whichupholds heaven”, then all the worlds should manifest that law ofthe Truth and all of them should be so many heavens. Whencethen comes this falsehood, sin, death, suffering of our mortalexistence? We are told that there are eight sons of the cosmicAditi who are born from her body; by seven she moves to thegods, but the eighth son is Martanda, of the mortal creation,whom she casts away from her; with the seven she moves tothe supreme life, the original age of the gods, but Martanda isbrought back out of the Inconscient into which he had been castto preside over mortal birth and death.

This Martanda or eighth Surya is the black or dark, thelost, the hidden sun. The Titans have taken and concealed himin their cavern of darkness and thence he must be released intosplendour and freedom by the gods and seers through the powerof the sacrifice. In less figurative language the mortal life isgoverned by an oppressed, a hidden, a disguised Truth; just asAgni the divine seer-will works at first upon earth concealed orobscured by the smoke of human passion and self-will, so Suryathe divine Knowledge lies concealed and unattainable in thenight and darkness, is enveloped and contained in the ignoranceand error of the ordinary human existence. The Seers by thepower of truth in their thoughts discover this Sun lying in thedarkness, they liberate this knowledge, this power of undividedand all-embracing vision, this eye of the gods concealed in oursubconscient being; they release his radiances, they create thedivine Dawn. Indra the divine Mind-power, Agni the Seer-Will,Brihaspati the Master of the inspired word, Soma the immortalDelight born in man aid them to shatter the strong places of the


mountain, the artificial obstructions of the Titans are broken andthis Sun soars up radiant into our heavens. Arisen he mountsto the supramental Truth. “He goes where the gods have madea path for him cleaving like an eagle to his goal”; he ascendswith his seven shining horses to the utter luminous ocean of thehigher existence; he is led over it by the seers as in a ship. Surya,the Sun, is himself perhaps the golden ship in which Pushan theIncreaser leads men beyond evil and darkness and sin to theTruth and the Immortality.

This is the first aspect of Surya that he is the supreme Lightof the truth attained by the human being after his liberation fromthe Ignorance. “Beholding a higher Light beyond this darknesswe have followed it and reached the highest Light of all, Suryadivine in the divine Being.” This is the Vedic way of putting theidea which we find more openly expressed in the Upanishads,the fairest form of Surya in which man sees everywhere the onePurusha with the liberated vision “He am I.” The higher light ofSurya is that by which vision rises on our darkness and movestowards the superconscient, the highest that other greater Truth-vision which, having attained, moves in the farthest supremeworld of the Infinite.

This brilliant Surya is made by the godward will of man;he is perfectly fashioned by the doers of divine works. For thislight is the vision of the highest to which man arrives by theYajna or Yoga of his being, by its union through a long labourof self-uplifting and self-giving to the powers of the concealedTruth. “O Sun, thou all-seeing Intelligence,” cries the Rishi,“may we, living creatures, behold thee bringing to us the greatLight, blazing out on us for vision upon vision of the beatitude,ascending to the bliss in the vast mass of thy strength above!”The Life-powers in us, the purifying storm-gods who battle forthe knowledge, they who are created by the divine Mind Indraand taught by Varuna who is the divine Purity and Wideness,are to attain to their enjoyment by the light of this Surya.

The light of Surya is the form, the body of that divine vision.He is described as the pure and visioned force of the Truth whichshines out in his rising like the gold of Heaven. He is the great


godhead who is the vision of Mitra and Varuna; he is the largeand invincible eye of that Wideness and that Harmony; the eyeof Mitra and Varuna is the great ocean of vision of Surya. Hisis that large truth-vision which makes us give to its possessorsthe name of seer. Himself the “wide-seeing”, “the Sun, the Seerwho knows the triple knowledge of these gods and their moreeternal births”, he sees all that is in the gods and all that is inmen; “beholding the straight things and the crooked in mortalshe looks down upon their movements.” It is by this eye of lightthat Indra, who has made him arise in heaven for far vision,distinguishes the Aryan powers from the Dasyu, separating thechildren of light from the children of darkness so that he maydestroy these but raise those to their perfection.

But seerhood brings with it not only the far vision but thefar hearing. As the eyes of the sage are opened to the light,so is his ear unsealed to receive the vibrations of the Infinite;from all the regions of the Truth there comes thrilling into himits Word which becomes the form of his thoughts. It is when“the thought rises from the seat of the Truth” that Surya byhis rays releases into the wideness the mystic Cow of Light.Surya himself is not only “the son of Heaven who is the far-seeing eye of knowledge born of the gods”, but he is the speakeralso of the supreme word and the impeller of the illuminedand illuminating thought. “The truth that thou rising free fromsin, O Sun, speakest today to Mitra and Varuna, that may wespeak and abide in the Godhead dear to thee, O Aditi, and thee,O Aryaman.” And in the Gayatri, the chosen formula of theancient Vedic religion, the supreme light of the godhead SuryaSavitri is invoked as the object of our desire, the deity who shallgive his luminous impulsion to all our thoughts.

Surya Savitri, the Creator; for the seer and the creator meetagain in this apotheosis of the divine vision in man. The victoryof that vision, the arising of this Light to “its own home of thetruth”, the outflooding of this great ocean of vision of Suryawhich is the eye of the infinite Wideness and the infinite Har-mony, is in fact nothing else than the second or divine creation.For then Surya in us beholds with a comprehensive vision all the


worlds, all the births as herds of the divine Light, bodies of the in-finite Aditi; and this new-seeing of all things, this new-mouldingof thought, act, feeling, will, consciousness in the terms of theTruth, the Bliss, the Right, the Infinity is a new creation. It is thecoming into us of “that greater existence which is beyond on theother side of this smaller and which, even if it be also a dreamof the Infinite, puts away from it the falsehood.”

To prepare that new birth and new creation for man by hisillumination and upward voyaging is the function of Surya, thedivine Light and Seer.

THE DIVINE DAWN

As the Sun is image and godhead of the golden Light of the divineTruth, so Dawn is image and godhead of the opening out ofthe supreme illumination on the night of our human ignorance.Dawn daughter of Heaven and Night her sister are obverse andreverse sides of the same eternal Infinite. Utter Night out ofwhich the worlds arise is the symbol of the Inconscient. Thatis the inconscient Ocean, that the darkness concealed withindarkness out of which the One is born by the greatness of Hisenergy. But in the world of our darkened mortal view of thingsthere reigns the lesser Night of the Ignorance which envelopsheaven and earth and the mid-region, our mental and physi-cal consciousness and our vital being. It is here that Dawn thedaughter of Heaven rises with the radiances of her Truth, withthe bliss of her boons; putting off the darkness like a blackwoven robe, as a young maiden garbed in light, this bride of theluminous Lord of beatitude unveils the splendours of her bosom,reveals her shining limbs and makes the Sun ascend upon theupclimbing tier of the worlds.

This night of our darkness is not entirely unillumined. Ifthere be nothing else, if all is deep gloom, yet the divine flameof the seer-will Agni burns through the dense murk giving lightto him who sits afar in its shadow; though not yet kindled, asit shall be at dawn, on a sacrificial altar, yet even so it fulfilson our earth as the lowest and greatest of the gods the will and


works of the hidden Light in spite of all this enveloping smoke ofpassion and desire. And the stars shine out and the moon comesat night making manifest the invincible workings of the infiniteKing. Moreover, always Night holds hidden in her bosom herluminous sister; this life of our ignorance taught by the godsin their veiled human working prepares the birth of the divineDawn so that, sped forth, she may manifest the supreme creationof the luminous Creator. For the divine Dawn is the force or faceof Aditi; she is the mother of the gods; she gives them birth intoour humanity in their true forms no longer compressed into ourlittleness and veiled to our vision.

But this great work is to be done according to the orderedgradations of the Truth, in its fixed seasons, by the twelvemonths of the sacrifice, by the divine years of Surya Savitri.Therefore there is a constant rhythm and alternation of nightand dawn, illuminations of the Light and periods of exile fromit, openings up of our darkness and its settling upon us oncemore, till the celestial Birth is accomplished and again till it isfulfilled in its greatness, knowledge, love and power. These laternights are other than those utter darknesses which are dreadedas the occasion of the enemy, the haunt of the demons of divisionwho devour; these are rather the pleasant nights, the divine andblessed ones who equally labour for our growth. Night andDawn are then of different forms but one mind and suckle alter-nately the same luminous Child. Then the revealing lustres of thebrighter goddess are known in the pleasant nights even throughthe movements of the darkness. Therefore Kutsa hymns the twosisters, “Immortal, with a common lover, agreeing, they moveover heaven and earth forming the hue of the Light; common isthe path of the sisters, infinite; and they range it, the one and theother, taught by the gods; common they, though different theirforms.” For one is the bright Mother of the herds, the other thedark Cow, the black Infinite, who can yet be made to yield usthe shining milk of heaven.

Thus the Dawns come with a constant alternation, thrice ten— the mystic number of our mentality — making the month, tillsome day there shall break out upon us the wondrous experience


of our forefathers in a long bygone age of humanity when thedawns succeeded each other without the intervention of anynight, when they came to the Sun as to a lover and circled roundhim, not returning again and again in his front as a precursor ofhis periodical visitations. That shall be when the supramentalconsciousness shines out fulfilled in the mentality and we shallpossess the year-long day enjoyed by the gods on the summit ofthe eternal mountain. Then shall be the dawning of the “best” orhighest, most glorious Dawn, when “driving away the Enemy,guardian of the Truth, born in the Truth, full of the bliss, utteringthe highest truths, fulfilled in all boons she brings the birth andmanifestation of the godheads.” Meanwhile each dawn comesas the first of a long succession that shall follow and pursues thepath and goal of those that have already gone forward; each inher coming impels the life upwards and awakens in us “someonewho was dead”. “Mother of the gods, force of the Infinite, thevast vision that awakes from the sacrifice she creates expressionfor the thought of the soul” and gives us the universal birth inall that is born.

The Vedic Rishis, inspired poets penetrated with the beautyand glory of physical Nature, could not fail to make the most ofthe figures given to them by this splendid and attractive symbolof the earthly dawning, so that if we read carelessly or withtoo much attachment to the poetical figure we may miss orrepel their deeper meaning. But in no hymn to their beautifulgoddess do they forget to give us shining hints, illuminatingepithets, profound mystical phrases which shall recall us to thedivine sense of the symbol. Especially do they use that figureof the rays that are herds of shining cows around which theyhave woven the mystic parable of the Angiras Rishis. Dawnis invoked to shine out on us as when she shone upon theseven-mouthed Angiras, on the unity of the nine-rayed and theten-rayed seers who by the utter thought of the soul, by theword that illumines broke open the fortified pens, “pens of thedarkness” in which the Panis, misers and traffickers of the Night,had shut up the Sun’s radiant herds. Her rays are as loosingsforth of these shining ones; the Dawns themselves are as if the


released upward movements of those herded illuminations. Pureand purifying, they break open the doors of the pen. Dawn is thetruth-possessing mother of the herds; she is herself the shiningCow and her milk is the divine yield of heaven, the luminousmilk which is mixed with the wine of the gods.

This Dawn illumines not only our earth but all the worlds.She brings out into expression the successive planes of our exis-tence so that we may look upon all “the diverse lives” of whichwe are capable. She reveals them by the eye of the Sun andfronting “the worlds of the becoming she stands aloft over themall as the vision of immortality.” She is herself that which shinesout widely as the Eye, and like her lover the Sun she gives notonly the vision, but also the word; “she finds speech for everythinker,” she creates expression for the thought in the soul. Tothose who saw only a little she gives wide vision and brings outinto expression for them all the worlds. For she is a godhead ofthought, the “young and ancient goddess of many thoughts whomoves according to the divine law.” She is the goddess of the per-ceptive knowledge who has the perfect truth; she is the supremelight of all lights and is born as a varied and all-embracingconscient vision. She is the light full of knowledge which risesup out of the darkness. “We have crossed through to the othershore of this darkness,” cries the Rishi, “Dawn is breaking forthand she creates and forms the births of knowledge.”

Constantly the idea of the Truth is associated with this lu-minous goddess Usha. She awakens full of the Truth by theilluminations of heaven; she comes uttering words of truth; herdawns are luminous in their entering in because they are true asbeing born from the Truth; it is from the seat of the Truth thatthe dawns awake. She is the shining leader of perfect truths whoawakens in perception to things of varied light and opens alldoors. Agni, the mighty one, enters into a great wideness of ourheaven and earth receiving his impulsion in the foundation of theTruth which is the foundation of the Dawns; for the outshiningof this Dawn is “the vast knowledge of Mitra and Varuna andlike a thing of delight it orders the light everywhere in manyforms.”


Moreover she gives the riches we seek and leads man onthe divine path. She is the queen of all boons and the wealth shegives, expressed in the mystic symbols of the Cow and the Horse,is the bright abundance of the higher planes; Agni begs from herand attains in her luminous coming their delightful substance;she gives to the mortal inspired knowledge and plenitude andimpelling force and vast energy. It is she who creates the Path formortals by her light; she makes for them the good paths that arehappy and easy of going. She moves man to his journey; “Thou”says the Rishi “art there for strength and knowledge and greatimpulsion, thou art our movement to the goal, thou makest usset forth on the journey.” Her path is a path of light and shemoves on it with horses yoked by the Truth, herself possessedof the Truth and vast by its power. She follows effectively thepath of the Truth and as one that knows she destroys not itsdirections. “Therefore,” runs the chant, “O Dawn divine, shineout on us immortal, in thy chariot of bliss, uttering the wordsof Truth; let horses bring thee that are well-governed, golden ofhue, wide in their strength.”

Like all the leaders of the Path, she is a destroyer of enemies.While the Aryan wakes in the dawn, the Panis, misers of Lifeand Light, sleep unawakening in the heart of the darkness wherethere are not her varied rays of knowledge. Like an armed heroshe drives away our enemies and dispels the darkness like acharging war-horse. The daughter of heaven comes with thelight driving away the enemy and all darknesses. And this Lightis the light of the world of Swar, the luminous world that SuryaSavitri shall create for us. For because she is divine Dawn of theluminous paths, vast with the Truth and bringing to us its brightworld, therefore the illumined adore her with their thoughts.Removing, as it were, a woven robe the bride of the Lord ofbeatitude by her perfect works and her perfect enjoyment createsSwar and spreads wide in her glory from the ends of heaven overall the earth; she attains to a high-uplifted strength in heavenestablishing the honey of the sweetness and the three luminousregions of that world are made to shine out by the delightfulvision of this great Dawn.


Therefore cries the Rishi, “Arise, life and force have cometo us, the darkness has departed, the Light arrives; she has madeempty the path for the journey of the Sun; thither let us go wherethe gods shall carry forward our being beyond these limits.”

PUSHAN THE INCREASER

Since the divine work in us cannot be suddenly accomplished, thegodhead cannot be created all at once, but only by a luminousdevelopment and constant nurture through the succession ofthe dawns, through the periodic revisitings of the illuminingSun, Surya the Sun-Power manifests himself in another form asPushan, the Increaser. The root of this name means to increase,foster, nourish. The spiritual wealth coveted by the Rishis is onethat thus increases “day by day”, that is, in each return of thisfostering Sun; increase or growth (pus.t.i) is a frequent object oftheir prayers. Pushan represents this aspect of the Surya-power.He is the “lord and master of plenitudes, lord of our growings,our comrade”. Pushan is the enricher of our sacrifice. VastPushan shall advance our chariot by his energy; he shall becomefor the increase of our plenitudes. Pushan is described as himselfa stream of the divine riches and a lavish heap of its substance.He is lord of the vast treasure of its joy and companion of ourfelicity.

The return of the night of ignorance which intervenes be-tween the successive dawns is imaged as the loss of the radiantherds of the Sun frequently stolen from the seer by the Panis andsometimes as the loss of the Sun itself hidden by them again intheir tenebrous cavern of the subconscient. The increase whichPushan gives depends on the recovery of these disappearing il-luminations of the Truth. Therefore this god is associated withIndra the Power of divine Mind, his brother, friend, ally in battle,in their forceful recovery. He perfects and accomplishes our hostthat seeks for the herds so that they conquer and possess. “LetPushan pursue after our luminous herds, let Pushan guard ourwar-horses, let Pushan conquer for us the plenitude. O Pushan,go after our cows. . . . Let Pushan hold his right hand over us


in front; let him drive back to us that which we have lost.” Soalso he brings back the lost Surya. “O shining Pushan, bring tous, as if our lost herd, the God of the varied fullness of flamewho upholds our heavens. Pushan finds the shining King whowas hidden from us and concealed in the cave.” And we aretold of the luminous goad which this resplendent deity bears,the goad that urges the thoughts of the soul and is the means ofaccomplishment of the herd of the radiant illuminations. Whathe gives to us is secure; for because he has the knowledge, he losesnot the herd and is the guardian of the world of our becoming.He has the variously ordaining and comprehensive no less thanthe complete unified vision of all our worlds and therefore he isour fosterer and increaser. He is the lord of our felicity who losesnot our possession of knowledge and so long as we abide in thelaw of his workings we shall suffer no hurt nor diminution. Thehappy state of the soul that he gives removes from it all sin andevil and makes today and makes tomorrow for the building upof the whole godhead in our universal being.

Since Surya is the lord of the Knowledge, Pushan also isespecially the knower and thinker and guardian of the shiningthoughts of the seer — the keeper of the herds delighting in thethought who is immanent in the whole world and all-pervadingfosters all the forms of creative knowledge. It is this Increaserwho stirs and impels the minds of the illumined and is themeans of accomplishment and perfection of their thoughts; heis the seer set in man the thinker, the comrade of his illuminedmind who moves him upon the path. He manifests in us thethought which wins the Cow and the Horse and all the plenitudeof the wealth. He is the friend of every thinker; he cherishesthe thought in its increase as a lover cherishes his bride. Thethoughts that seek the supreme felicity are the forces that theIncreaser yokes to his car, they are the “unborn ones”1 who takeupon them the yoke of his chariot.

1 The word has the double meaning of goat and unborn. The words meaning sheepand goat are used with a covert sense in the Veda like that which means cow. Indra iscalled both the Ram and the Bull.


The image of the chariot, of the journey, of the path occursconstantly in association with Pushan because this growth whichhe gives is a journey towards the fullness of the Truth that liesbeyond. The Path in the Veda is always the path of this Truth.Thus the Rishi prays to Pushan to become for us the charioteer ofthe Truth and the idea of the Vedic thought and knowledge andthe idea of the Path are frequently interwoven with each other.Pushan is the lord of the Path whom we yoke as if a chariot forthought, for the winning of the plenitude; he distinguishes ourpaths so that the thoughts may be accomplished and perfected;he leads us on them by knowledge, forcefully teaching us, saying“thus it is and thus” so that we learn from him of the homes towhich we travel; it is as the seer that he is the impeller of thehorses of our chariots. Like Usha he makes for us happy pathsof an easy going, — for he finds for us the will and strength, —and by his traversing of them rids us of evil. The wheel of hischariot comes not to harm, nor is there any trouble or sufferingin its movement. There are indeed enemies on the way, but heshall slay these oppressors of our journey. “O Pushan, the wolf,the troubler of our bliss who teaches us evil, him smite from thePath. The adversary, the robber perverse of heart, drive him farfrom the road of our journeying. Set thy foot on the distressfulforce of whatsoever power of duality expresses evil in us.”

Thus beyond all the obstacles that cling to our wheelsPushan, the divine and luminous increaser of man’s soul, shalllead us to the light and bliss which Surya Savitri creates. “TheLife that is the life of all shall guard thee; Pushan shall guardthee in thy forward path in front, and where the doers of thegood work are seated, where they have gone, there shall thedivine Savitri set thee. Pushan knoweth all the regions and heshall lead us by the way which is freest from peril. Let thegiver of felicity, the blazing god who has all the energies leadsteadily in our front by his knowledge. Pushan has been born inthy forward travelling on the paths through earth and throughheaven; for he moves in both the worlds which are made full ofdelight for us; here he ranges in his knowledge and he journeysbeyond.”


SAVITRI THE CREATOR

The result of the procession of the shining dawns, of the divinereturns of Surya, of the increasings of Pushan and his leading onthe Path is summed up in the creation of Savitri the luminousCreator. It is the god Savitri who sets us there where the ancientdoers of the Work have preceded us; that is the desirable flameand splendour of the divine Creator on which the seer has tomeditate and towards which this god impels our thoughts, thatthe bliss of the creative godhead on the forms of which oursoul must meditate as it journeys towards it. It is the supremecreation in which the goddess undivided and infinite speaks outher Word and the all-ruling kings Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman;to that consummation the power of all these godheads turnswith a united acceptance.

That divine word is the word of the Truth; for a supercon-scient Truth lies concealed and is the basis of the infinite beingwhich stands revealed on those higher altitudes of our ascension.What we now accept as life is the evil dream, the death thatgoverns us because we live in a false knowledge, a limited anddivided existence exposed to every devourer. That is not real life.For life we have to be able to look long upon the Sun; for life wehave to be able to hold in our thought a knowledge and a wordfull of the consummate perception; we have to bring forward theTruth as an offering so that the luminous god with his goldenhands full of the Light may rise high in our heavens and hearour word. We must choose and take into ourselves that supremeand vast state of this Mighty One who has the thought of theknowledge, he who creates for the gods the immortality and thehighest enjoyment; we must widen out the cord of Savitri so thatit shall release us into higher states of life made accessible to menand harmonised with their being. To hold that felicity we haveto become free from sin and evil in the wideness and purity ofVaruna, in the all-embracing harmony of Mitra, in the supremecreation of Savitri.

Then Savitri shall loose away from us, shall uncreate thesuffering of the evil dream. For the seeker of the straightness


he shall create an increasing wideness of his existence so thateven with our incomplete knowledge we shall grow in our beingtowards the gods. By the godheads he will foster our knowledgeand lead us towards that universal formation of them in theundivided consciousness of the infinite Aditi which we havechosen as our goal. All that we have done in our ignorance, inour divided and oppressed discernment of things, in our meremortal becoming and humanity, against gods or men, he shalluncreate and make us free from the sin. For he is the creator ofthe Right, he is the creator who creates the Truth.

That Truth he shall create in a great wideness and force ofour physical being, in a rich abundance of our mental and byits undiminishable vastness he shall uphold all the worlds ofour existence. Thus in the working of Savitri whose creation isthe Truth and of Mitra and Varuna the gods shall uphold inus its substance of varied light, the felicity of its energies andilluminations till all existence is that godhead of Savitri behindus and before, below as well as above, till we possess the far-extended life and have built up the universal form of our being,— the universal form which he creates for us when with handsof golden light, with the tongue that tastes the wine of sweetnesshe moves in the triple knowledge of the highest heaven of Truth,attains in the gods to the divine rhythm which he creates forhis accomplished Law and takes up his abode in that goldenstrength of his, the Seer robed in light who first stretched outhis two arms of knowledge and power to create the world. Hewho as Twashtri the Fashioner of things attended always bythe male godheads and their female energies, powers of Purushaand powers of Prakriti, made and makes all things, shall asSavitri create for man the thinker born in a body that Truth andImmortality.

THE FOUR KINGS

The creation of Surya Savitri starts from the repeated risings ofthe divine Dawn and grows by the constant nourishing of herspiritual gifts and possessions through the work in us of Surya


Pushan. But the actual formation, the perfected fullness dependon the birth and growth in us of all the gods, the children ofAditi, the All-Gods (Visve Devah. ) and especially of the four greatluminous Kings, Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga, Aryaman. Indra and theMaruts and the Ribhus, Vayu, Agni, Soma and the Ashwins areindeed the principal agents; Vishnu, Rudra, Brahmanaspati, thefuture mighty Triad, preside over the indispensable conditions,— for the one paces out the vast framework of the inner worldsin which our soul-action takes place, the other in his wrath andmight and violent beneficence forces onward the great evolutionand smites the opponent and the recusant and the ill-doer, andthe third administers always the seed of the creative word fromthe profundities of the soul; so too Earth and Heaven and thedivine Waters and the great goddesses and Twashtri the Fash-ioner of things on whom they attend, either provide the field orbring and shape the material; but over the utter creation, over itsperfect vast space and pure texture, over the sweet and orderedharmony of its steps, over the illumined force and power ofits fulfilment, over its rich, pure and abundant enjoyment andrapture the Sun-gods Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga cast theglory and protection of their divine gaze.

The sacred poems in which the All-Gods and the Adityas,the sons of the Infinite, and Aryaman, Mitra and Varuna arepraised, — not the mere hymns of formal invocation to the sac-rifice, — are among the most beautiful, solemn and profoundthat the imagination of man has conceived. The Adityas aredescribed in formulas of an incomparable grandeur and sub-limity. No mythic barbarian gods of cloud, sun and showerare these, no confused allegories of wonder-stricken savages,but the objects of worship to men far more inwardly civilisedand profound in self-knowledge than ourselves. They may nothave yoked the lightning to their chariots, nor weighed sun andstar, nor materialised all the destructive forces in Nature to aidthem in massacre and domination, but they had measured andfathomed all the heavens and earths within us, they had casttheir plummet into the Inconscient and the subconscient and thesuperconscient; they had read the riddle of death and found the


secret of immortality; they had sought for and discovered theOne and known and worshipped Him in the glories of His lightand purity and wisdom and power. These were their gods, asgreat and deep conceptions as ever informed the esoteric doc-trine of the Egyptians or inspired the men of an older primitiveGreece, the fathers of knowledge who founded the mystic ritesof Orpheus or the secret initiation of Eleusis. But over it all therewas the “Aryan light”, a confidence and joy and a happy, equalfriendliness with the Gods which the Aryan brought with himinto the world, free from the sombre shadows that fell uponEgypt from contact with the older races, Sons of deep-broodingEarth. These claimed Heaven as their father and their seers haddelivered his Sun out of our material darkness.

The self-luminous One is the goal of the Aryan-minded;therefore the seers worshipped him in the image of the Sun. Oneexistent, him have the seers called by various names, Indra, Agni,Yama, Matarishwan. The phrases “That One”, “That Truth”,2

occur constantly in the Veda in connection with the Highestand with the image of His workings here, the Sun. In one sub-lime and mystic chant the refrain returns perpetually, “The vastmightiness of the Gods, — That One.” There is the goal of thatjourney of the Sun by the path of the Truth which we haveseen to be also the journey of the awakened and illumined soul.“Concealed by this truth is that Truth of you,” of Mitra andVaruna, “where they unyoke the horses of the Sun. The ten hun-dreds meet there together, — That One, I have seen the supremeGod of the embodied gods.” But in itself the One is timelessand our mind and being exist in Time. “It is neither today nortomorrow; who knoweth That which is transcendent? When itis approached, it vanishes from us.” Therefore we have to growtowards it by giving birth to the gods in ourselves,3 increasingtheir strong and radiant forms, building up their divine bodies,and this new birth and self-building is the true nature of the

2 Tad ekam, tat satyam — phrases always carefully misinterpreted by the commenta-tors.3 Devavıti, devatati.


sacrifice, — the sacrifice through which there is the awakeningof our consciousness to immortality.4

The sons of the Infinite have a twofold birth. They are bornabove in the divine Truth as creators of the worlds and guardiansof the divine Law; they are born also here in the world itself andin man as cosmic and human powers of the Divine. In the visibleworld they are the male and female powers and energies of theuniverse and it is this external aspect of them as gods of the Sun,Fire, Air, Waters, Earth, Ether, the conscious-forces ever presentin material being which gives us the external or psycho-physicalside of the Aryan worship. The antique view of the world as apsycho-physical and not merely a material reality is at the rootof the ancient ideas about the efficacy of the mantra and therelation of the gods to the external life of man; hence the forceof prayer, worship, sacrifice for material ends; hence the use ofthem for worldly life and in so-called magic rites which comesout prominently in the Atharva Veda and is behind much ofthe symbolism of the Brahmanas.5 But in man himself the godsare conscious psychological powers. “Will-powers, they do theworks of will; they are the thinkings in our hearts; they are thelords of delight who take delight; they travel in all the directionsof the thought.” Without them the soul of man cannot distin-guish its right nor its left, what is in front of it nor what is behind,the things of foolishness or the things of wisdom; only if led bythem can it reach and enjoy “the fearless Light”. For this reasonDawn is addressed “O thou who art human and divine” andthe gods constantly described as the “Men” or human powers(manus.ah. , narah. ); they are our “luminous seers”, “our heroes”,“our lords of plenitude”. They conduct the sacrifice in theirhuman capacity (manus.vat) as well as receive it in their highdivine being. Agni is the priest of the oblation, Brihaspati thepriest of the word. In this sense Agni is said to be born fromthe heart of man; all the gods are thus born by the sacrifice,

4 Amr.tasya cetanam.5 This is the real secret of the external sense of Veda which is all that the modern

scholars have seen and so imperfectly understood. Even the exoteric religion was muchmore than a mere Nature worship.


grow and out of their human action assume their divine bodies.Soma, the wine of the world-delight, rushing through the mindwhich is its “luminous wide-extended” strainer of purification,cleansed there by the ten sisters, pours forth giving birth to thegods.

But the nature of these inner powers is always divine andtherefore their tendency is upward to Light and immortalityand infinity. They are “the Sons of the Infinite, one in their willand work, pure, purified in the streams, free from crookedness,free from defect, unhurt in their being. Wide, profound, uncon-quered, conquering, with many organs of vision, they beholdwithin the crooked things and the perfect; all is near to the Kings,even the things that are highest. Sons of the Infinite, they dwellin the movement of the world and uphold it; gods, they are theguardians of all that becomes as universe; far-thoughted, full ofthe Truth, they guard the Might.” They are kings of the universeand of man and of all its peoples (nr.pati, vispati), self-emperors,world-emperors, not as the Titans strive to be in the falsehoodand the division, but because they are kings of the Truth. Fortheir mother is Aditi “in whom there is no duality”, Aditi “theluminous undivided who upholds the divine habitation that is ofthe world of Light” and to her her sons “cleave ever waking”.They are “most straight” in their being, will, thought, delight,action, movement, they are “thinkers of the Truth whose law ofnature is the law of the Truth”, they are “seers and hearers ofthe Truth”. They are “charioteers of the Truth, whose seat is inits mansions, purified in discernment, unconquerable, the Menwide-visioned”. They are the “Immortals who know the Truth”.Thus free from the falsehood and the crookedness, these innerdivinities rise in us to their natural level, home, plane, world.“Of a double birth they are true in their being and lay hold onthe Truth, very vast and one in the Light and are possessed ofits luminous world.”

In this upward movement they cleave away from us theevil and the ignorance. These are they who “cross beyond intothe sinlessness and the undivided existence”. Therefore they are“the gods who deliver”. For the enemy, the assailant, the doer of


harm their knowledge becomes as if snares wide-spread, for tohim light is a cause of blindness, the divine movement of goodan occasion of evil and a stumbling-block; but the soul of theAryan seer passes beyond these dangers like a mare hasteningwith a chariot. In the leading of the gods he avoids all stumblingsinto evil like so many pitfalls. Aditi, Mitra and Varuna forgivehim whatever sin he may have committed against their vastoneness, purity, harmony so that he can hope to enjoy the wideand fearless Light and the long nights shall not come upon him.That the Vedic gods are no mere physical Nature-powers, butthe psychic conscious forces behind and within all cosmic things,is made clear enough by the connection between their cosmiccharacter and this deliverance from sin and falsehood: “Since yeare they who rule over the world by the power of their mind ofknowledge, thinkers of all that is stable and mobile, therefore,O gods, carry us beyond the sin of that which we have done andthat which we have not done to the felicity.”

There is always the image of the path and the journey, thePath of the Truth on which we are led forward by a divineleading. “O Sons of the Infinite, effect for us the fearless peace,make us good paths of an easy going to the felicity.” “Easyof going is your path, O Aryaman, O Mitra, it is thornless, OVaruna, and perfect.” “They whom the Sons of Infinity lead withgood leadings pass beyond all sin and evil to the felicity.” Alwaysthat goal is the felicity, the wide bliss and peace, the unbrokenLight, the vast Truth, the Immortality. “O ye gods, put far fromus the hostile (dividing) force, give us wide peace for the felicity.”“The Sons of Infinity give us the imperishable Light.” “Createthe Light, O ye minds of knowledge of our sacrifice.” “Thatincreasing birth of you we would know today, O sons of theInfinite, which creates, O Aryaman, even in this world of fearthe beatitude.” For it is the “fearless Light” that is created, wherethere is no peril of death, sin, suffering, ignorance, — the light ofthe undivided, infinite, immortal, rapturous Soul of things. For“these are the rapturous lords of Immortality, even Aryamanand Mitra and Varuna all-pervading.”

Still, it is in the image of Swar, the world of the divine


Truth that the goal is concretely figured. “Let us reach” is theaspiration “the Light that is of Swar, the Light which nonecan tear asunder.” Swar is the great, inviolable birth of Mitra,Varuna, Aryaman which is contained in the luminous heavens ofthe soul. The all-ruling Kings, because they grow perfectly andthere is no crookedness in them, hold our habitation in heaven.That is the triple world in which the uplifted consciousnessof man reflects the three divine principles of being, its infiniteexistence, its infinite conscious-force, its infinite bliss.6 “Threeearths they hold, three heavens, three workings of these gods inthe Knowledge within; by the Truth, O Sons of Infinity, great isthat vastness of yours, O Aryaman, O Mitra, O Varuna, greatand beautiful. Three heavenly worlds of light they hold, thegods golden-shining who are pure and purified in the streams;sleepless, unconquerable they close not their lids, they expressthe wideness to the mortal who is straight.” These all-purifyingstreams are those of the rain, the abundance, the rivers of theheaven of Truth. “Charioted in light are they, aggressive inknowledge, sinless and they clothe themselves in the rain andabundance of heaven for the felicity.” By the pouring out of thatabundance they prepare our souls to ascend to its source, thehigher ocean from which the luminous waters descend.

It will be seen how largely the great triad, Varuna, Mitra,Aryaman figure in the hymns to the All-Gods and to the sons ofthe Infinite Mother. With Bhaga as a consummating fourth theydominate the thought of the Rishis in their culminant aspirationto the mass and apex of the perfect truth and infinity. This pre-eminence they owe to their particular character and functionswhich appear, not often indeed with any great prominence, butas a background to their common action, their united natureof light, their undifferentiated achievement. For they have onelight, one work, they perfect in us one indivisible Truth; and itis this union of all the godheads in our consenting universality7

that is the objective of the Vedic thought in these Aditya hymns.

6 Tridhatu.7 Visvadevyam.


Still the union comes about by a combination of their powersand therefore each has in it his own proper nature and function.That of the Four is to build up the whole divine state into its per-fection by the natural interaction of its four essential elements.The Divine is existence all-embracing, infinite and pure; Varunabrings to us the infinite oceanic space of the divine soul and itsethereal, elemental purity. The Divine is boundless conscious-ness, perfect in knowledge, pure and therefore luminously rightin its discernment of things, perfectly harmonious and happy inits concordance of their law and nature; Mitra brings us this lightand harmony, this right distinction and relation and friendlyconcord, the happy laws of the liberated soul concordant withitself and the Truth in all its rich thought, shining actions andthousandfold enjoyment. The Divine is in its own being pure andperfect power and in us the eternal upward tendency in things totheir source and truth; Aryaman brings to us this mighty strengthand perfectly-guided happy inner upsurging. The Divine is thepure, the faultless, the all-embracing, the untroubled ecstasy thatenjoys its own infinite being and enjoys equally all that it createswithin itself; Bhaga gives us sovereignly that ecstasy of the liber-ated soul, its free and unfallen possession of itself and the world.

This quaternary is practically the later essential trinity ofSachchidananda, — Existence, Consciousness, Bliss with self-awareness and self-force, Chit and Tapas, for double terms ofConsciousness; but it is here translated into its cosmic termsand equivalents. Varuna the King has his foundation in theall-pervading purity of Sat; Mitra the Happy and the Mighty,most beloved of the Gods, in the all-uniting light of Chit; many-charioted Aryaman in the movement and all-discerning force ofTapas; Bhaga in the all-embracing joy of Ananda. Yet as all thesethings form one in the realised godhead, as each element of thetrinity contains the others in itself and none of them can existseparately from the rest, therefore each of the Four also possessesby force of his own essential quality every general attribute of hisbrothers. For this reason if we do not read the Veda as carefullyas it was written, we shall miss its distinctions and see only theindistinguishable common functions of these luminous Kings,


— as indeed throughout the hymns the unity in difference of allthe gods makes it difficult for the mind not accustomed to thesubtleties of psychological truth to find in the Vedic divinitiesanything but a confused mass of common or interchangeableattributes. But the distinctions are there and have as great aforce and importance as in the Greek and Egyptian symbolism.Each god contains in himself all the others, but remains stillhimself in his peculiar function.

This nature of the difference between the Four explains theirvarying prominence in the Veda. Varuna is easily the first andmost considerable of them all, for realisation of infinite existenceis the basis of the Vedic perfection: the wideness and purityof the divine being once attained, all the rest comes inevitablycontained in it as possession and power and attribute. Mitrais seldom hymned except in union with Varuna or else as aname and form of the other gods, — oftenest of the cosmicworker Agni, — when arriving in their action to the harmonyand the light they reveal in themselves the divine Friend. To thetwin-power Mitra-Varuna the greater number of the hymns tothe luminous Kings are addressed, a certain number to Varunaseparately or to Varuna-Indra, one to Mitra, two or three toBhaga, none at all to Aryaman. For the infinite wideness andpurity being founded, the luminous harmony of the workingsof the gods by the correlated laws of the different planes of ourbeing from the spiritual to the material has to be realised in thatcontinent and on that foundation; and this is the combinationMitra-Varuna. The power of Aryaman is hardly viewed as anindependent principle, — just as force in the world is only amanifestation, movement or dynamic value of existence, is onlya working out, a liberation of consciousness, of knowledge, ofthe inherent Truth of things into stuff of energy and form ofeffect, or is only the effective term of the self-discovering andself-seizing movement by which Being and Consciousness re-alise themselves as Bliss. Therefore Aryaman is invoked alwaysin conjunction with Aditi or Varuna or Mitra or in the greatrealising Triad or in the realised quaternary or in the generalinvocation of the All-Gods and the Adityas.


Bhaga on the other hand is the crown of our movement tothe possession of the hidden divine Truth of our existence; forthe essence of that Truth is beatitude. Bhaga is Savitri himself;the All-Enjoyer is the Creator fulfilled in the divine purpose ofhis creation. Therefore he is the result more than the agent, orelse the last agent of all, the possessor more than the giver ofour spiritual plenitude.

** *

The hymn of the Rishi Vamadeva to the All-Gods shows witha clear lucidity the high-aspiring hope which these Vedic deitieswere invoked to favour and bring to a happy culmination: —

“Who of you is our deliverer? who our defender? O Earthand Heaven, free from division, deliver us; rescue, O Mitra, OVaruna, from the mortality that is too strong for us! Who of you,O gods, confirms for us the supreme good in the march of thesacrifice? They who illumine our high original seats, they wholimitless in knowledge dawn out putting away our darkness,it is they, imperishable all-ordainers, who order them for us;thinkers out of the Truth, they shine forth in light, achievers.I seek for my companion by the words illumining the flowingriver Aditi, she who is the divine felicity. O Night and Dawnunconquerable, so do ye make it that both the Days shall utterlyprotect us. Aryaman and Varuna distinguish the Path, and Agnilord of the impulsion, the path of the happy goal. O Indra andVishnu, affirmed, extend to us perfectly the peace in which arethe Powers, the mighty protection. I embrace the increasings ofParvata and of the Maruts and of Bhaga, our divine deliverer.May the master of things protect us from the sin of the worldand Mitra keep us far from the sin against Mitra. Now shall oneaffirm the goddesses Earth and Heaven with the Dragon of thefoundation by all the things desired that we must obtain; as if topossess that Ocean by their wide ranging they have uncoveredthe (hidden) rivers that are voiceful with the burning Light. Maygoddess Aditi with the gods protect us, may the divine Delivererdeliver us, unremitting; let us not diminish the foundation of


Mitra and Varuna and the high level of Agni. Agni is the lordof that vast substance of riches and perfected enjoyment; helavishes on us those abundances. O Dawn, voice of the Truth,queen of plenitude, bring to us the many desirable boons, thouwho hast in thee all their plenty. To that goal may Savitri, Bhaga,Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, Indra move aright for us with richesof our felicity.”

VARUNA

We have the word Varuna from a root which means to surround,cover or pervade. From these significances of the name thereemerged before the poetic eye of the ancient mystics the imagesthat are our nearest concrete representation of the Infinite. Theysaw God as a highest covering Heaven, felt divine existencelike an encompassing ocean, lived in its boundless presence asin a pure and pervading ether. Varuna is this highest heaven,this soul-surrounding ocean, this ethereal possession and infinitepervasion.

The same root had given them an appellation for the darkCoverer, the adversary Vritra; for to obstruct and resist, screenor hedge, besiege and hem in are also some of its many kindredsenses. But dark Vritra is the thick cloud and the envelopingshadow. His knowledge — for he too has a knowledge, a Maya,— is the sense of limited being and the hiding away in subcon-scient Night all the rest of the rich and vast existence that shouldbe ours, and for this negation and contrary power of creativeknowledge he stands up stiffly against the Gods, — his undivineright against the divine right of God and man. Varuna by hiswide being and ample vision rolls back these limits; surroundingus with light his possession reveals what dark Vritra’s obsessionhad withheld and obscured. His godhead is the form or spiritualimage of an embracing and illuminating Infinity.

For this reason the physical figure of Varuna is much lessdefinite than the burning Fire or the radiant Sun or the luminousDawn. The old commentators thought strangely enough that hewas the God of Night. In the Puranas he is the deity of the waters


and his noose, which in the Veda never pretends to be anythingmore than a psychological metaphor, has become the violentlasso of the ocean-god. European scholars have identified himwith the Greek Uranus and perceiving something of his originalethereal nature have supposed a conceptual transference, a sortof fall or even a deposition from azure above to azure below.Indra, perhaps, becoming master of the skies and king of thegods, Varuna the original King had to be satisfied with the do-minion of the waters. If we understand the symbolic method ofthe mystics, we shall see that these suppositions are unnecessary.Their method is to combine various ideas and images containedtogether in a general conception which gives all the links. So,Varuna of the Veda is at once King — not of the heavens assuch, for that is Dyaushpita, nor of the heavens of light, forthat is Indra, — but of the highest covering ether and all oceans.All expanses are Varuna’s; every infinity is his property andestate.

Ether and ocean meet together and become one in the mysticconception; and the origin of this unity is not far to seek. Theancient concept of creation, held all over the world from theHimalayas to the Andes, conceived of the stuff of things as aformless expanse of waters covered over in the beginning bydarkness out of which day and night and heaven and earth andall worlds have emerged. “Darkness,” says the Hebrew Genesis,“was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved onthe waters.” By the word he divided the waters with Heaven, thefirmament; so that now there are two waters, one earthly belowthe firmament, the other heavenly above. The mystics seized onthis universal belief or this universal image and crowded intoit their opulent psychological values. Instead of one firmamentthey saw two, the earthly and the celestial; instead of two oceans,three spread out before their unsealed vision.

What they saw, was what man will ever see when he changesthe physical for the psychical vision of Nature and the world.Below them they looked down on an unfathomable night andsurging obscurity, darkness hidden within darkness, the incon-scient waters from which by the mighty energy of the One their


existence had arisen. Above them they beheld a remote oceanof light and sweetness, a highest ether, the supreme step of all-blissful Vishnu, to which their attracted being must ascend. Oneof these was the dense dark ether, an unformed material incon-scient Non-existence; the other a luminous ethereal All-conscientand the absolute of existence. These two were the dark and theshining extension of the One.

Between these two unknown infinities, infinite potentialzero and infinite plenary x, they saw around them, before theireyes, below, above, a third sea of ever-developing consciousbeing, a sort of boundless wave, which they spoke of by ahardy metaphor as climbing up or flowing up beyond heavento the supreme seas. It is this perilous ocean which we have tonavigate. There Bhujyu, the seeker of enjoyment, son of KingTugra the Forceful-Hastening, was about to sink, cast in by hisfalse companions, souls of an evil movement; but the marvel-lous chariot-ship of the Ashwins came hastening to his succour.Varuna must teach with his vast Right and Truth our limited willand judgment, if we would escape such perils: we must embarkin no human galley, but “ascend the divine ship, the blamelessand well-oared vessel that sinketh not, by which may we voyagesafe beyond sin and evil.” Into this intermediate ocean, aboveour earth, we have seen the sun of Knowledge rise out of theinconscient cave and voyage led by the seers. For this too isan ocean-ether. Or, let us say, it is a tier of ethers. To followthe Vedic imagery we must suppose ocean superimposed uponocean. This world is a series of heights that are depths anda mutual involution and evolution of vastnesses that have noending: ether below rises to ever more luminous ether above,every stratum of consciousness rests upon many inferior andaspires to many higher strata.

But beyond our farthest skies in the supreme ocean of lightand expanse of the highest superconscient ether our haven awaitsus in a Truth hidden by lesser truth, even as in the inconscientNight darkness is enwrapped and protected by an ever greaterdarkness. That is the truth of King Varuna. Thither the Dawnsshining arise, the rivers travel and the Sun unyokes there the


horses of his chariot. And Varuna contains, sees, governs allthis in his vast being and by his illimitable knowledge. All theseoceans are his, even to the Inconscient and its nights so oppositein their seeming to his nature which is that of the extended radi-ance of one eternal, vast sun of happy light and truth. Day andNight, light and darkness are symbols in his infinity. “LuminousVaruna has embraced the nights; he holds the Dawns within himby his creative knowledge; visioned, he is around every object.”

From this idea of the oceans arose naturally the psycholog-ical concept of the Vedic rivers. These rivers are everywhere.They are the waters which flow down from the mountain andascend the mind ranging through and illuminating with theirflow the dark subconscient secrets of Vritra; they are the mightyones of Heaven whom Indra brings down on the Earth; they arethe streams of the Truth; they are the rain from its luminousheavens; they are the seven eternal sisters and companions; theyare the divine waters who have knowledge. They descend uponthe earth, they rise from the ocean, they flow to the ocean,they break out from the doors of the Panis, they ascend to thesupreme seas.

Oceanic Varuna is king of all these waters. “In the uprisingof the rivers” it is said “he is a brother of seven sisters, he isin their middle.” And another Rishi has sung, “In the riversVaruna is seated upholding the law of his works, perfect in willfor empire.” Vasishtha speaks with a more explicit crowdingof psychological suggestions, of “the divine, pure and purify-ing waters, honey-pouring, in the midst of whom King Varunamarches looking down on the truth and the falsehood in crea-tures.” Varuna too, like Indra with whom he is often associated,releases the waters; sped from his mighty hands they too, likehim, become all-pervading and flow to a limitless goal. “The sonof Infinity, the wide upholder, has loosed them forth everywhere;the rivers journey to the truth of Varuna.”

Not only the goal, the march too is his. “Varuna of thepuissance and the thousandfold vision beholds the goal of theserivers; he is the king of the kingdoms, he is the form of therivers, for him is a strength supreme and universal.” His oceanic


movement envelops all the kingdoms of being and ascends tothe Paradise of the heaven of heavens. “He is the hidden ocean”it is said “and he climbs passing beyond heaven; when he hasset the sacrificial word in these dawns, then with his luminousfoot he tramples asunder illusions and ascends to Paradise.”Varuna, we see, is the oceanic surge of the hidden Divine as herises, progressively manifested, to his own infinite wideness andecstasy in the soul of the god-liberated seer.

The illusions which he shatters with his tread are the falseformations of the Lords of Evil. Varuna, because he is this etherof divine Truth and ocean of divine being, is what no personifiedphysical sea or sky could ever become, the pure and majesticKing who strikes down evil and delivers from sin. Sin is a vio-lation of the purity of the divine Right and Truth; its reactionis the wrath of the Pure and Puissant. Against those who likethe Sons of Darkness serve self-will and ignorance, the king ofthe divine Law hurls his weapons; the cord descends upon them;they fall into the snare of Varuna. But those who seek after theTruth with sacrifice are delivered from bondage to sin like acalf released from the rope or a victim set free from the slaying-post. The Rishis deprecate frequently the retributive violence ofVaruna and pray to him to deliver them from sin and its wages,death. “Repel the Destruction away from us,” they cry, “loosefrom us even the sin that we have done”; or, always with thesame sense of a chain and a bondage, “Cleave away sin fromme like a cord.”

The crude conception of sin as a result of natural wickednessfound no place in the thought of these deep thinkers and subtlepsychologists. What they perceived, was a great insistent forceof Ignorance; either a non-perception of right and truth in themind or a non-seizing of it in the will, or an inability of the lifeinstincts and desires to follow after it, or the sheer inefficiencyof the physical being to rise to the greatness of the divine law.Vasishtha cries to mighty Varuna in a passionate litany, “It isfrom poverty of the will that we have gone contrary to thee,O pure and puissant One: be gracious to us, have grace. Thirstfound thy adorer though he stood in the middle of the waters;


be gracious, O puissant Lord, have grace. Whatever this be, OVaruna, that we human beings act, a treason against the DivineBirth, wheresoever by the Ignorance we have put away thy laws,smite us not for that sin, O God.”

Ignorance, this matrix of sin, has in its substantial effectthe appearance of a triple cord of limited mind, inefficient life,obscure physical animality, the three ropes with which the RishiShunahshepa in the parable was bound as a victim to the sac-rificial post. The whole result is a struggling or inert poverty ofbeing; it is the meagreness of a mortal undelight and the insuffi-ciency of a being that collapses at every moment towards death.When Varuna the Mighty comes and sunders this threefold re-straint, we are freed towards riches and immortality. Uplifted,the real man arises to his true kingship in the undivided being.The upper cord flies upward releasing the wings of the Soul intosuperconscient heights; the middle cord parts both ways and allways, the constrained life breaking out into a happy breadthof existence; the lower cord collapses downward taking with itthe alloy of our physical being to disappear and be dissolved inthe stuff of the Inconscient. This liberation is the purport of theparable of Shunahshepa and his two great hymns to Varuna.

As ignorance or falsehood in the being — the Veda prefersusually the less abstract phrase — is the cause of wrong andsuffering, so Knowledge or Truth is the agent which purifiesand liberates. It is because of the eye with which he sees, —the luminous symbolic Sun, — that Varuna is the purifier. Andunless he governs the will and teaches the judgment while thedivine Thought is being learned, we cannot ascend on to theship of the gods to be borne by it over the life-ocean beyondall this stumbling and evil. Dwelling in us as the thinker withknowledge Varuna cleaves away the sin that we have committed;he abolishes by his royal power our debts of the Ignorance. Or,using a different image, the Veda tells us that this King has inhis service a thousand physicians; it is by their healing of ourmental and moral infirmities that we get a secure foundation inVaruna’s wide and deep right-mindedness.

The Kingship of great Varuna is an unbounded empire over


all being. He is a mighty world-ruler, an emperor, samrat.. Hisepithets and descriptions are those which a mind at once reli-gious and philosophic could apply with little or no change tothe supreme and universal Godhead. He is the vastness and themultiplicity; among his usual epithets are vast Varuna, abundantVaruna, Varuna of whom wideness is the habitation, Varunaof many births. But his puissant being is not only a universalwideness; it is a universal force and might. The Veda says of himin words that have both an outward and an inward significance:“Thy force and might and passion neither these Birds in theirtravelling can attain, nor these Waters ranging sleeplessly, northey who hedge in the hugeness of the wind.” It is a force ofuniversal existence which is active around and in all that lives.8

Behind this vast universality of force and being there watchesand acts a vast universality of knowledge. The epithet of king-hood is constantly coupled with the epithet of seerhood, nototiosely but in the strong, pregnant antique style. Varuna hasa manifold energy, — the hero’s, — and wide expression, — thethinker’s; he comes to us as a godhead of the glory of force andin the same movement we find in him a soul of wide vision.

The full significance of this constant coupling of epithets ap-pears in the double character of his sovereignty; he is svarat. andsamrat., self-ruler and emperor. They are the two faces of Aryankingship. In man they are a royalty of thought and action and theplenitude of wisdom and will; the King-Sage, the Hero-Thinker.In the Godhead, in Varuna “almighty, omniscient, thousand-visioned, whose form is the Truth”, they lift us up to supremeand universal principles; we see revealed a divine and eternalmajesty, the plenitude of consciousness and the plenitude ofForce, Wisdom omnipotent, Power omniscient, Law justified,Truth fulfilled.

Varuna, the Vedic symbol of this grandiose conception, isdescribed finely as a vast thinker and guardian of the Truth. Inhim, it is said, all wisdoms are lodged and gathered up into theirnodus; he is the divine Seer who nurtures the seer-knowings of

8 Visvayu.


man as if heaven were increasing its form. We find here thekey to the symbol of the luminous cows. For it is said of himthat, upholder of the worlds, he knows the hidden names ofthese shining ones and the thoughts of the seers go beyond likecows to the pastures desiring the wide-visioned. It is said of himtoo that he guards for the Maruts, greatened in knowledge, thethoughts of men like the cows of a herd.

That is the side of thought; there are parallel descriptions forthe side of action. Great Varuna is the continent and nodus of theworld’s uplifted puissances no less than of its arising thoughts.The unconquered workings that fall not from the Truth areestablished in him as upon a mountain. Because he thus knowsthe things that are transcendent, he is able to cast his majesticeye of sovereignty upon our existence and see there “the thingsthat are done and those that remain to be done”. The thingsthat remain to be done — and also to be known. The wisdom ofVaruna shapes in us the divine word which, inspired, intuitive,opens the doors to new knowledge. “We desire him” cries theRishi “as the finder of the Path because he unveils the thoughtby the heart; let new truth be born.” For this King is no whirlerof a brute and stupid wheel; his are not the unfruitful cycles ofa meaningless Law. There is a Path; there is a constant progress;there is a goal.

Varuna is the leader on this path. “Perfect in will” criesShunahshepa “let the son of Infinity make us by the good pathand carry our life forward. Varuna puts on his golden robe oflight and his scouts are all around.” These detect the ambushedfoes of the Light, the piercers of our hearts — who would pre-vent, it is to be supposed, the unveiling of the Truth-thoughtby the heart. For this journey which we saw as a march of thewaters, we see also as a journey of the sun with the all-wiseand all-powerful King for its Guide. In the vast where there isno foundation Varuna has built a high pyramid of the fuel ofsacrifice for the fire that must be the blazing material of a divineSun. “Its rays are directed downward, their foundation is above;let their perceptions of knowledge be established in us within.King Varuna has made a wide path for the Sun to follow; where


there is no footing he has made places for him to set his feet. Heshall make manifest too those who pierce the heart.” His purityis a great devourer of the hurters of the soul.

The Path is a constant making and building of new truth,new powers, higher realisations, new worlds. All heights towhich we can climb from the basis of our physical existenceare described in symbolic figure as mountain summits upon theearth and Varuna of the vision holds them all in himself. Worldafter world is reached as level and ever higher level of a greatmountain; the voyager in the forward march of Varuna is saidto lay his grasp on all things that are born in all the statuses.But his final goal must be the highest triple world of the Deva.“Three delightful Dawns increase according to the law of hisworkings. He of the all-seeing wisdom dwells in three white-shining earths; three are the higher worlds of Varuna whence herules over the harmonies of seven and seven. He is the builder ofthe original seat, ‘That Truth’ of Varuna; and he is the guardianand the mover.”

In sum, then, Varuna is the ethereal, oceanic, infinite Kingof wide being, wide knowledge and wide might, a manifestationof the one God’s active omniscience and omnipotence, a mightyguardian of the Truth, punisher and healer, Lord of the nooseand Releaser from the cords, who leads thought and actiontowards the vast light and power of a remote and high-upliftedTruth. Varuna is the King of all kingdoms and of all divine andmortal beings; earth and heaven and every world are only hisprovinces.

MITRA

If the purity, infinity, strong royalty of Varuna are the grandframework and majestic substance of the divine being, Mitra isits beauty and perfection. To be infinite, pure, a king over oneselfand a master-soul must be the nature of the divine man becauseso he shares in the nature of God. But the Vedic ideal is notsatisfied simply with a large, unfulfilled plan of the divine image.There must be noble and rich contents in this vast continent; the


many-roomed tenement of our being contained in Varuna hasto be ordered by Mitra in the right harmony of its utility and itsequipment.

For the godhead is a plenitude as well as an infinity; Varunais an ocean no less than an ethereal heaven. Pure and subtle asthe ether, his strong substance is yet no serene void or easy vagueof inactive peace, but rather we have seen in it a surging marchof thought and action; he has been described to us as a nodus inwhich all wisdom is upgathered and a hill upon which the orig-inal, unfallen workings of the gods are supported. King Varunais one who sleeps not, but is awake and mighty forever, eternallyan effective force and worker for the Truth and the Right. Stillhe acts as the guardian of the Truth rather than constitutes it,or constitutes rather through the action of other godheads whoavail themselves of his wideness and surging force. He keeps,drives even the shining herds, but does not assemble them in thepastures, an upholder of our powers and remover of obstaclesand enemies much more than a builder of our parts.

Who then gathers knowledge into this nodus or links divineaction in this sustainer of works? Mitra is the harmoniser, Mitrathe builder, Mitra the constituent Light, Mitra the god whoeffects the right unity of which Varuna is the substance and theinfinitely self-enlarging periphery. These two Kings are comple-mentary to each other in their nature and their divine works.In them we find and by them we gain harmony in largeness:we see in the Godhead and increase in ourselves purity withoutdefect basing love faultless in wisdom. Therefore these two area great duo of the self-fulfilling godhead and the Vedic wordcalls them together to a vaster and vaster sacrifice to whichthey arrive as the inseparable builders of an increasing Truth.Madhuchchhandas gives us the keynote of their united divinity.“Mitra I call, the pure in judgment, and Varuna, devourer ofthe foe. By Truth, Mitra and Varuna, Truth-increasers who getto the touch of Truth, you attain to a vast working of the will.Seers, dwellers in the wideness, born with many births, theyuphold the judgment at its works.”

The name Mitra comes from a root which meant originally


to contain with compression and so to embrace and has givenus the ordinary Sanskrit word for friend, mitra, as well as thearchaic Vedic word for bliss, mayas. Upon the current sense ofthe word mitra, the Friend, the Vedic poets continually rely fortheir covert key to the psychological function of this apparentsungod. When the other deities and especially the brilliant Agniare spoken of as helpful friends to the human sacrificer, they aresaid to be Mitra, or to be like Mitra, or to become Mitra, — as weshould now say, the divine Will-force, or whatever other powerand personality of the godhead, reveals itself eventually as thedivine Love. Therefore we must suppose that to these symbolistsMitra was essentially the Lord of Love, a divine friend, a kindlyhelper of men and immortals. The Veda speaks of him as themost beloved of the gods.

The Vedic seers looked at Love from above, from its sourceand root and saw it and received it in their humanity as anoutflowing of the divine Delight. The Taittiriya Upanishad ex-pounding this spiritual and cosmic bliss of the godhead, VedanticAnanda, Vedic Mayas, says of it, “Love is its head.” But the wordit chooses for Love, priyam, means properly the delightfulnessof the objects of the soul’s inner pleasure and satisfaction. TheVedic singers used the same psychology. They couple mayas andprayas, — mayas, the principle of inner felicity independent ofall objects, prayas, its outflowing as the delight and pleasure ofthe soul in objects and beings. The Vedic happiness is this divinefelicity which brings with it the boon of a pure possession andsinless pleasure in all things founded upon the unfailing touchof the Truth and Right in the freedom of a large universality.

Mitra is the most beloved of the gods because he bringswithin our reach this divine enjoyment and leads us to this per-fect happiness. Varuna makes directly for strength; we discover aforce and a will vast in purity; Aryaman the Aspirer is secured inthe amplitude of his might by Varuna’s infinity; he does his largeworks and effects his great movement by the power of Varuna’suniversality. Mitra makes directly for bliss, — Bhaga the Enjoyeris established in a blameless possession and divine enjoyment bythe all-reconciling harmony of Mitra, by his purifying light of


right discernment, his firmly-basing law. Therefore it is said ofMitra that all perfected souls adhere or are firmly fixed “to thebliss of this Beloved in whom there is no hurt”, for in him thereis no sin or wound or falling. All mortal delight has its mortaldanger; but the immortal light and law secures the soul of manin a fearless joy. That mortal, says Vishwamitra, who learns byMitra’s law, the law of this Son of Infinity, is possessed of prayas,the soul’s satisfaction in its objects; such a soul cannot be slain,nor overcome, nor can any evil take possession of it from nearor from afar. For Mitra fashions in gods and men impulsionswhose action spontaneously fulfils all the soul’s seekings.

That happy freedom of all-possession comes to us out ofthis godhead’s universality and his reconciling luminous em-brace of things: Mitra’s is the principle of harmony by whichthe manifold workings of the Truth agree together in a perfectlywedded union. The root of the name means both to embraceand to contain and hold and, again, to build or form in thesense of linking together the parts or materials of a whole.Adorable Mitra is born in us as a blissful ordainer of things anda king full of might. Mitra holds up heaven and earth and lookssleeplessly upon the worlds and the peoples, and his vigilantand perfect ordinances create in us a happy rightness of mindand feeling — sumati, a state of grace, we might almost say, —which becomes for us an unhurt abiding-place. “Free from allundelightfulness,” says the Vedic verse, “rejoicing with rapturein the goddess of the Word, bowing the knee in the wideness ofearth, may we attain to our abiding-place in the law of workingof Mitra, son of Infinity, and dwell in his grace.” It is when Agnibecomes Mitra, when the divine Will realises the divine Lovethat, in the Vedic image, the Lord and his Spouse agree in theirmansion.

The well-accorded happiness of the Truth is Mitra’s lawof working; for it is upon Truth and divine Knowledge that thisharmony and perfect temperament are founded; they are formed,secured and guarded by the Maya of Mitra and Varuna. Thatwell-known word comes from the same root as Mitra. Mayais the comprehending, measuring, forming Knowledge which


whether divine or undivine, secure in the undivided being ofAditi or labouring in the divided being of Diti, builds up thewhole scene, environment, confines, and defines the whole con-dition, law and working of our existence. Maya is the active,originative, determinative view which creates for each being ac-cording to his own consciousness his own world. But Mitra isa Lord of the Light, a Son of Infinity and a Guardian of theTruth and his Maya part of an infinite, supreme and faultlesscreative wisdom. He builds, he joins together in an illuminatedharmony all the numerous planes, all the successive steps, all thegraded seats of our being. Whatsoever Aryaman aspires to onhis path, has to be effected by the ‘holdings’ or laws of Mitraor by his foundations, statuses, placings, mitrasya dharmabhih. ,mitrasya dhamabhih. . For dharma, the law is that which holdsthings together and to which we hold; dhama, the status is theplacing of the law in a founded harmony which creates for usour plane of living and the character of our consciousness, actionand thought.

Mitra, like the other sons of Aditi, is a master of Knowledge.He possesses a light which is full of a varied inspiration, or, tokeep closer to the Vedic term, a richly diversified hearing ofthe knowledge. In the wideness of existence which he enjoys incommon with Varuna, he acquires possession of heaven by thatgreatness of the being of the Truth and enlarges his conquer-ing mastery over the earth by these inspirations or hearings ofits Knowledge. All the five Aryan peoples labour therefore andtravel for this bright and beautiful Mitra who comes into themwith his luminous force and bears in his wideness all the Gods.He is the great and blissful one who sets and leads creaturesborn into the world upon their path. The distinction is drawnin one verse that Varuna is the masterful traveller to the soul’ssupreme seat, Mitra makes men advance in that march. “Evennow” says the Rishi “may I attain the movement to the goal andjourney on Mitra’s path.”

Since Mitra cannot fulfil his harmony except in the widenessand purity of Varuna, he is constantly invoked in company withthat great godhead. Theirs are the supreme statuses or planes of


the soul; it is the bliss of Mitra and Varuna that has to increasein us. By their law that vast plane of our consciousness shinesout upon us and heaven and earth are the two paths of theirjourney. For Aditi of the Truth, their mother, has borne themomniscient and great for almightiness; and it is luminous Aditi,the undivided being, whom they, wakeful from day to day, cleaveto, she who holds for us our habitations in that world of lightand they attain to its luminous forcefulness. They are the twoSons perfect in their birth from of old who support the law ofour action; children are they of a vast luminous power, offspringof the divine discerning thought and perfect in will. They are theguardians of Truth, possessed of its law in the supreme ether.Swar is their golden home and birth-place.

Mitra and Varuna have an unwounded vision and are betterknowers of the Path than our sight; for in the Knowledge theyare seers of Swar. They take by the passion of their discerningthought the concealing falsehood away from the Truth to whichthe path has to lead. They proclaim the vast Truth of whichthey are possessed. It is because they possess it and with it theperfection of the will which is its effect, that they are seated inus for empire and uphold our action as the masters of might.By Truth they come to the Truth, nourishing in their lordship ofthings our thoughts, and in their purified judgment they openthe eye of consciousness to all wisdom by the perception in men.Thus all-seeing and all-knowing they by the law, by the Mayaof the mighty Lord, guard our actions, even as they govern thewhole world in the power of the Truth. That Maya is establishedin the heavens, it ranges there as a Sun of light; it is their rich andwonderful weapon. They are far-hearers, masters of true being,true themselves and increasers of truth in each human creature.They nourish the shining herds and loose forth the abundanceof heaven; they make heaven to rain down by the Maya of theMighty Lord. And that celestial rain is the wealth of the spiritualfelicity which the seers desire; it is the immortality.9

9 Vr.s.t.im vam radho amr.tatvam ımahe.


ARYAMAN

Aryaman, third of the four great solar godheads, is the leastprominent of them all in the invocations of the seers. No sep-arate hymn is addressed to him and, if his name occurs notunfrequently, it is in scattered verses; there is no strong body ofRiks from which we can construct firmly our idea of his func-tions or recompose his physiognomy. Most often he is simplyinvoked by his bare name along with Mitra and Varuna or inthe larger group of the sons of Aditi, almost always in adjunctionto other kindred deities. Still there are half a dozen or more half-riks from which his one chief and characteristic action emergesaccompanied by the usual epithets of the Lords of the Truth,epithets expressive of Knowledge, Joy, Infinity and Power.

In the later tradition the name of Aryaman is placed at thehead of the Fathers to whom as their appropriate offering isgiven the symbolic food, the pin. d. a of the Puranic funeral andmemorial rites. In the Puranic traditions the Fathers are of twoclasses, divine and human, the latter being the ancestors, theManes. But it is in connection with the Fathers as the souls whohave attained to heaven, to immortality that we must think ofAryaman. Krishna in the Gita, enumerating the chief powersor manifestations of the eternal Godhead in things and beings,speaks of himself as Ushanas among the seers, Bhrigu among theRishis, Vyasa among the sages, Vishnu among the children ofAditi, Aryaman among the Fathers. Now in the Veda the Fathersare the ancient illumined ones who discovered the Knowledge,created and followed the Path, reached the Truth, conqueredImmortality; and in the few Riks in which Aryaman’s sepa-rate personality emerges, it is as the God of the Path that he ishymned.

His name Aryaman, kin etymologically to the words arya,arya, ari, by which are distinguished the men or peoples whofollow the Vedic culture and the Gods who assist them in theirbattles and their aspirations, is similarly indicative. The Aryanis the traveller on the Path, the aspirant to immortality by divinesacrifice, one of the shining children of Light, a worshipper of the


Masters of the Truth, a fighter in the battle against the powersof darkness who obstruct the human journey. Aryaman is thegodhead in whose divine power this Aryahood is rooted; he isthis Force of sacrifice, aspiration, battle, journey towards per-fection and light and celestial bliss by which the path is created,travelled, pursued beyond all resistance and obscuration to itsluminous and happy goal.

In consequence, the action of Aryaman takes up the at-tributes of Mitra and Varuna as leaders of the Path. This Forcefulfils the happy impulsions of that Light and Harmony andthe movement of infinite knowledge and power of that pureVastness. Like Mitra and Varuna he makes men travel on thepath; he is full of the perfect happiness of Mitra; he is completein the will and the works of sacrifice; he and Varuna distinguishthe path for mortals. He is like Varuna a godhead manifold inhis births; like him he oppresses the wrath of the hurter of men.It is by the great path of Aryaman that we shall cross beyondthe souls of a false or evil thought who obstruct our path. Aditi,mother of the Kings, and Aryaman carry us by paths of a happytravelling beyond all inimical powers. The man who seeks thestraightness of Mitra’s and Varuna’s workings and by the forceof the word and the affirmation embraces their law with all hisbeing, is guarded in his progress by Aryaman.

But the Rik most distinctive of the function of Aryaman isthat which describes him as “Aryaman of the unbroken path,of the many chariots, who dwells as the sevenfold offerer ofsacrifice in births of diverse forms.” He is the deity of the hu-man journey who carries it forward in its irresistible progresswhich the attacks of the enemy cannot overcome or successfullyinterrupt so long as this divine Force is our leader. The journeyis effected through a manifold movement of our evolution, themany chariots of Aryaman. It is the journey of the human sac-rifice which has a sevenfold energy of its action because thereis a sevenfold principle in our being which has to be fulfilled inits integral perfection; Aryaman is the master of the sacrificialaction who offers this sevenfold working to the godheads of theDivine Birth. Aryaman within us develops our various forms


of birth in the ascending planes of our existence by which theFathers climbed, travellers on his path, and by which it must bethe aspiration of the Aryan soul to climb, to the highest summitof Immortality.

Thus Aryaman sums up in himself the whole aspirationand movement of man in a continual self-enlargement and self-transcendence to his divine perfection. By his continuous move-ment on the unbroken path Mitra and Varuna and the sons ofAditi fulfil themselves in the human birth.

BHAGA

The goal of the path is the divine beatitude, the illimitable joyof the Truth, of the infinity of our being. Bhaga is the godheadwho brings this joy and supreme felicity into the human con-sciousness; he is the divine enjoyer in man. All being has thisdivine enjoyment of existence for its aim and end, whether itseeks for it with knowledge or with ignorance, with the divinestrength or the weakness of our yet undeveloped powers. “OnBhaga the strong calls for his increasing, on Bhaga he who hasnot the strength; then he moves towards the Delight.” “Let uscall in the Dawn on Bhaga strong and victorious, the son ofAditi who is the wide-upholder, on whom the afflicted and thefighter and the king meditate and they say to the Enjoyer, Giveus thy enjoyment.” “Let it be the divine Enjoyer who possessesthe enjoyment and by him let us be its possessors; to thee everyman calls, O Bhaga; do thou become, O Enjoyer, the leader ofour journey.” An increasing and victorious felicity of the soulrejoicing in the growth of its divine possessions which gives usstrength to journey on and overcome till we reach the goal ofour perfection in an infinite beatitude, this is the sign of the birthof Bhaga in man and this his divine function.

All enjoyment comes indeed from Bhaga Savitri, the mortalas well as the divine; “creating a wide and vast force he bringsforth for men their mortal enjoyment.” But the Vedic ideal is theinclusion of all life and all joy, divine and human, the widenessand plenty of earth and the vastness and abundance of heaven,


the treasures of the mental, vital, physical existence uplifted,purified, perfected in the form of the infinite and divine Truth.It is this all-including felicity which is the gift of Bhaga. TheEnjoyer is to be called on by men because he has many richesand ordains perfectly all delights, — the thrice seven delightsupheld by him in the being of his mother Aditi. It is by creatingin us “the wide and vast force”, it is when the Divine as Bhaga,Pushan, Aditi, the infinite, the undivided puts on the radiancesof the infinite consciousness like a robe and distributes withoutdivision all desirable boons that divine felicity comes to us inits fullness. Then he gives to the human being full enjoymentof that greatest delight. Therefore Vasishtha cries to him, “OBhaga, our leader, Bhaga who hast the wealth of the Truth,giving unto us, raise up and increase, O Bhaga, this thought inus,” — the Truth-thought by which the felicity is attained.

Bhaga is Savitri the Creator, he who brings forth from theunmanifest Divine the truth of a divine universe, dispelling fromus the evil dream of this lower consciousness in which we falteramidst a confused tangle of truth and falsehood, strength andweakness, joy and suffering. An infinite being delivered out ofimprisoning limits, an infinite knowledge and strength receivingin thought and working out in will a divine Truth, an infinitebeatitude possessing and enjoying all without division, fault orsin, this is the creation of Bhaga Savitri, this that greatest Delight.“This creation of the divine Creator goddess Aditi speaketh forthto us, this the all-kings Varuna and Mitra and Aryaman withone mind and heart.” The four Kings find themselves fulfilledwith their infinite Mother by the delightful perfection in man ofBhaga the Enjoyer, the youngest and greatest of them all. Thusis the divine creation of the fourfold Savitri founded on Varuna,combined and guided by Mitra, achieved by Aryaman, enjoyedin Bhaga: Aditi the infinite Mother realises herself in the humanbeing by the birth and works of her glorious children.

The First Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE LORDS OF THE THOUSAND-PILLARED HOMEOF TRUTH AND BLISS

[The Rishi hymns the eternal and immutable Truth of whichthe Truth in mutable things is the veil; that is the goal of thejourney of the manifested Sun of divine knowledge; it is theeternal unity of all things that are and the supreme Divine ofwhich the Gods are various forms. Into it unite all the wealth ofbeing and knowledge and power and bliss won by the sacrifice.It is the large vastness of the wide purities of Varuna and ofthe shining harmonies of Mitra. There, eternally stable, dwellthe herds of the divine radiances of knowledge; for that is thehappy field to which they here are travelling. The Impeller ofthe cosmic movement and journey pours out knowledge in us,the milk of the herds, by the dawns of the inner light and theredescend the streams of the immortal existence followed by thesingle and perfect movement of Mitra-Varuna, the Light and thePurity, the Harmony and the Infinity. It is the rain of heavenwhich these two Godheads pour down, upholding the physicalexistence in its fruits and the celestial in its herding radiancesof illumination. They thus create in man a force full of divineknowledge and a wide being which they guard and increase,a strewn seat for the sacrifice. This thousand-pillared force ofknowledge they make a home for themselves and dwell there inthe revelations of the Word. It is luminous in its form and itspillars of life have an iron strength and stability. They ascend toit in the dawning, in the rising of the Sun of knowledge and lookwith that eye of their divine vision on the infinite existence andthe finite, the indivisible unity of things and their multiplicity. Itis a home full and large with the sweetness and ecstasy of thesupreme and inviolable peace and bliss which by their cherishing

Hymns to the Lords of Light 519

and fostering protection we seek to conquer and possess.]

!t�n !tmEpEht� D��v� vA� s� y'�y y� Evm� c�y�vAn� df ftA sh t�T� �td�k� d�vAnA� )��W� vp� qAmp�ym� � ��

1. By the Truth1 is veiled that ever-standing Truth of yourswhere they unyoke the horses of the Sun;2 there the tenhundreds3 stand still together; That One, — I have beheldthe greatest of the embodied gods.4

t�s� vA� Em�AvzZA mEh�vmFmA' t�T� qFrhEBd�'d� �� Ev�vA� EpvT� �vsr�y D�nA an� vAm�k� pEvrA vvt' � ��

2. That is the utter vastness of you, O Mitra and Varuna; therethe Lord of the movement milks the herds of his stableradiances by the days. Lo, you twain swell all the streams ofthe Blissful One and your one wheel5 moves in their path.

aDAryt� p� ETvFm� t %A� Em�rAjAnA vzZA mhoEB� vD'ytmoqDF� Epvt� gA av v� E�V� s� jt� jFrdAn� � ��

3. You uphold earth and heaven, O Mitra King and KingVaruna, by your greatnesses; you increase the growths ofearth, you nourish the shining herds of heaven, you pourforth the rain of its waters, O swift in strength.

1 The active cosmic Truth of things diffused and arranged in their mutability anddivisibility of Time and Space veils the eternal and unchanging Truth of which it is amanifestation.2 The eternal Truth is the goal of the divine Light which arises in us and journeys

upward into higher and higher heavens through the shining upper ocean.3 The entire plenitude of the divine wealth in its outpourings of knowledge, force and

joy.4 The One, the Deva veiled by his form of the divine Sun. Cf. Isha Upanishad, “That

splendour which is thy fairest form, O Sun, that let me behold. The Purusha who is thereand there, He am I.”5 The unified movement, when the lower wheel of the Sun is struck away; the inferior

truth is taken up into the unity of the higher truth from which it now seems to beseparate in its motion.


aA vAm�vAs� s� y� jo vht� ytr�my up y�vvA'k� G� t�y EnEZ'gn� vt't� vAm� p EsDv� EdEv 0rEt � ��

4. Let horses perfectly yoked with their well-governed reins oflight bear you down to us; the form of the clarity follows inyour coming and the Rivers flow in the front of heaven.

an� )� tAmmEt� vD'd� vF: bEh'Erv yj� qA r0mAZA nm�vtA D� td0AED gt�' Em�AsAT� vzZ�1A�vt� � "�

5. Increasing the strength that comes to our ear of knowledge,guarding by the sacrificial word6 your wide realm7 as if ourseat of sacrifice, bringing obeisance, holding fast to judg-ment, you take your seat in your home, O Mitra, within therevealings of knowledge, O Varuna.

a+Evh�tA s� k� t� pr�pA y� �AsAT� vzZ�1A�vt� rAjAnA 0�m3ZFymAnA sh5�T� Z� EbB� T� sh �O � (�

6. With hands that spare not, protectors of the beyond forthe doer of perfect works whom you deliver and he dwellswithin the revealings of knowledge, kings free from passion,together you uphold a thousand-pillared strength.

Ehr yEnEZ'gyo a�y �T� ZA Ev B�Ajt� Ed4y�vAjnFv Bd�� 0�� EnEmtA EtESvl� vA sn�m m2vo aEDg�y'�y � *�

7. Its form is of golden light, iron is its pillar and shinesin heaven as if the swift lightning;8 in the happy field9 itis shaped or in the field of the gleaming.10 May we winpossession of the sweet honey11 which is in that home.

6 Yajur. The Rik is the word which brings with it the illumination, the Yajur the wordwhich guides the sacrificial action in accordance with the Rik.7 Or, “increasing and guarding the wide strength”.8 Or, “the Mare”, the energy of the Horse of Life.9 The Ananda, the Bliss-World.

10 The field of the gleaming of the Dawns, the world of the Light.11 Madhu, the Soma.


Ehr y#pm� qso 4y� �VAvy��T� Zm� EdtA s� y'�y aA rohTo vzZ Em� gt'mt�c0AT� aEdEt� EdEt� c � ,�

8. To that home whose form is of the gold, whose pillars areof the iron, in the breaking of the Dawn, in the uprising ofthe Sun you ascend, O Varuna, O Mitra, and thence youbehold the Infinite and the Finite.12

yd� b�Eh�W� nAEtEvD� s� dAn� aEQCd�� fm' B� vn�y gopA t�n no Em�AvzZAvEv�V� EsqAsto EjgFvA�s� �yAm � -�

9. That bliss of yours which is most large and full and withouta gap, O strong guardians of the world, so that none canpierce through and beyond it, by that cherish us, Mitra andVaruna; may we be victorious, who would take possessionof that peace.

12 Aditi and Diti.

The Second Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE GIVERS OF THE RAIN

[Mitra and Varuna are by their united universality and harmonythe guardians of the divine Truth and its divine Law eternallyperfect in the ether of our supreme being; thence they rain downthe abundance of the heavens and its bliss upon the favouredsoul. Seers in man of that world of Truth, as they are by theirguardianship of its law rulers of all this becoming, they give us itsrain of spiritual wealth and immortality. The Life-powers rangewith the voice of the truth-seeking thought through earth andheaven and the two Kings come to their cry with the brilliantclouds full of the creative waters. It is by the Maya, the divinetruth-knowledge of the Lord, that they thus rain down heaven;that divine knowledge is the Sun, the Light, the weapon of Mitraand Varuna ranging abroad to destroy the ignorance. At first theSun, the body of the Truth, is concealed in the very storm of itsoutpourings and only the sweetness of their streaming into thelife is felt; but the Maruts as Life-Powers and Thought-Powersrange abroad seeking in all the worlds of our being for the bril-liant rays of the concealed knowledge to be gathered as a shiningwealth; the voice of the Rain is full of the flashings of the Lightand the movement of the divine Waters; its clouds become robesfor the Life-Powers. Through it all by the formative knowledgeof the mighty Master of Truth and by the law of the Truth,the two kings maintain the divine workings in us, governingby the Truth all our being, and finally set in its sky the Sun,now revealed, as a chariot of the richly varied splendours of theknowledge, the chariot of the journey of the spirit to the highestheavens.]


!t�y gopAvED Et�WTo rT� s�yDmA'ZA prm� 4yomEn ym� Em�AvzZAvTo y� v� t�m� v� E�Vm'D� mE�pvt� Edv� � ��

1. Guardians of the Truth, you ascend your car and the law ofthe Truth is yours in the supreme ether.1 He whom here youcherish, Masters of the wideness and the harmony, for himincreases full of the honey the rain of heaven.

sm�AjAv�y B� vn�y rAjTo Em�AvzZA EvdT� �vd�'fA v� E�V� vA� rADo am� t�vmFmh� %AvAp� ETvF Ev crEt tyv� � ��

2. Emperors,2 you rule over this world of our becoming, OMitra and Varuna, in the getting of knowledge you areseers of the realm of Light; we desire from you the rain, thefelicitous wealth, the immortality, and lo! the Thunderers3

range abroad through earth and heaven.

sm�AjA ug�A v� qBA Edv�ptF p� ET4yA Em�AvzZA Evcq'ZF Ec��EBrB��zp Et�WTo rv� %A� vq'yTo as� r�y mAyyA � ��

3. Emperors, strong Bulls of the abundance, Masters of earthand heaven, O Mitra and Varuna, universal in your work-ings, you approach their cry with your clouds of varied lightand you rain down Heaven by the power of the knowledge4

of the Mighty One.5

1 The infinity of the superconscient being.2 Samrat., having perfect kingship over the subjective and objective existence.3 The Maruts, Life-Powers and Thought-Powers who find out the light of truth for all

our activities. The word may also mean formers or builders.4 Maya, the creative knowledge-will of the Deva.5 Asura, a word used in the Veda as in the Avesta for the Deva (Ahuramazda), but also

for the gods, His manifestations; it is only in a few hymns that it is used for the darkTitans, by another and fictitious derivation, a-sura, the not-luminous, the not-gods.


mAyA vA� Em�AvzZA EdEv E)tA s� yo' ?yoEt�crEt Ec�mAy� Dm� tmB��Z v� �XA g� hTo EdEv pj'y d� @sA mD� mt Irt� � ��

4. This is your knowledge, O Mitra and Varuna, that is lodgedin heaven; it is the Sun, it is the Light; it ranges abroad asyour rich and varied weapon. You hide it in heaven with thecloud and with the raining. O Rain, full of the honey startforth thy streamings.

rT� y� Rt� mzt� f� B� s� K� f� ro n Em�AvzZA gEvE�Vq� rjA�Es Ec�A Ev crEt tyvo Edv� sm�AjA pysA n u0tm� � "�

5. The Life-Powers yoke their happy car for the bliss, evenas might a hero for battle, O Mitra and Varuna, in theirseekings for the herds of Light; thundering they range thevaried worlds, and you pour out on us, rulers imperial, thewater of Heaven.

vAc� s� Em�AvzZAEvrAvtF� pj'yE�c�A� vdEt E�vqFmtFm� aB�A vst mzt� s� mAyyA %A� vq'ytmzZAmr�psm� � (�

6. O Mitra and Varuna, the Rain speaks its language6 richand varied and full of the light and the movement; the Life-Powers have put on your clouds for raiment. Utterly bythe knowledge you rain down Heaven ruddy-shining andsinless.

Dm'ZA Em�AvzZA EvpE�ctA v�tA r0�T� as� r�y mAyyA !t�n Ev�v� B� vn� Ev rAjT� s� y'mA D�To EdEv Ec{y� rTm� � *�

6 Here we see the subjective sense of the thunder in the symbol of the storm; it is theoutcrashing of the word of the Truth, the Shabda, as the lightning is the outflashing ofits sense.


7. O Mitra and Varuna illumined in consciousness, by theLaw, by the knowledge of the Mighty One you guard theworkings;7 by the Truth you govern widely all the worldof our becoming; you set the Sun in heaven, a chariot ofvarious splendour.

7 Vratani, called the Aryan or divine workings, those of the divine law of the Truth tobe revealed in man. The Dasyu or un-Aryan, whether human or superhuman, is he whois void of these diviner workings, opposes them in his darkened consciousness and triesto destroy them in the world. The Lords of Darkness are therefore called Dasyus, theDestroyers.

The Third Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE LEADERS TO THE BLISSFUL HOME

[The Rishi invokes the Lords of the infinite wideness and har-mony whose arms embrace the soul’s highest plane of the Truthand Bliss, to extend to him those arms of awakened conscious-ness and knowledge, so that he may have their all-embracingdelight. He aspires by the path of Mitra to the joy of his har-monies in which there is no wound nor hurt; conceiving andholding the highest by the power of the illumining word, hewould aspire to an increase in that plane, the proper home ofthe gods. Let the two great gods create in his being that wideworld of their divine strength and vastness; let them bring tohim its plenitude and felicity in the dawning of the divine lightand the divine force.]

vzZ� vo ErfAdsm� cA Em�� hvAmh� pEr v�j�v bAh� voj'gvA�sA �vZ'rm� � ��

1. Varuna, destroyer of the foe, and Mitra we call to you bythe word of illumination; their arms encompass the world ofthe power of Light1 as if cast around the pens of the shiningherds.

tA bAhvA s� c�t� nA ytm�mA ac't� f�v� Eh jAy: vA� Ev�vAs� 0As� jog� v� � ��

1 Swarnara. Swar is the solar world of the Truth and the herds are the rays of its solarilluminations, therefore it is compared to the pens of these shining Vedic cattle.


2. Stretch out your arms of awakened knowledge2 to the hu-man being when he chants to you the illumining word; yourbliss adorable shall reach through all our earths.3

y�� nm�yA� gEt� Em��y yAyA� pTA a�y E y�y fm' yEh�sAn�y sE�cr� � ��

3. May I go by the path of the Friend4 that even now I mayattain to the goal5 of my journey; so men cling firmly to thebliss of that Beloved in whom there is no wounding.

y� vA�yA� Em�AvzZopm� D�yAm� cA yd� D 0y� mGonA� �tot6 ZA� c �p� D's� � ��

4. O Mitra and Varuna, may my thought hold by the illuminingword that highest which is your possession, so that it shallaspire6 to the home of the masters of plenitude for them andfor men who affirm you.

aA no Em� s� dFEtEBv'zZ�c sD�T aA �v� 0y� mGonA� sKFnA� c v� Ds� � "�

5. O Mitra, come to us with thy perfect givings and Varuna inthe world of our session, for increase in their own home ofthe masters of plenitude7 and for increase of your compan-ions.

2 The epithet shows how entirely symbolic are the bodies and members of the Gods aswell as their other physical belongings, weapons, chariots, horses.3 All the planes of our being.4 Mitra, who creates the perfect and unhurt harmonies of our higher, divine exis-

tence.5 Gati. The word is still used for the spiritual or supraterrestrial status gained by man’s

conduct or efforts upon earth. But it may also mean the movement to the goal or theway, “May I even now attain to the Way, go by the path of Mitra.”6 That is, manifesting in men it shall strive to raise them up to its own proper station,

the Truth-plane.7 The gods. Swar is the “own house” of the Gods.


y� v� no y�q� vzZ 0�� b� hQc EbB� T� uz Zo vAjsAty� k� t� rAy� �v�ty� � (�

6. For in them you twain bring to us, O Varuna, the might8

and the vastness; form in us the wide world for the conquestof our plenitudes, for bliss, for our soul’s happiness.

uQC�yA� m� yjtA d�v0�� zf�Ev s� t� som� n hE�tEBrA pEX� BDA'vt� nrA EbB�tAvc'nAnsm� � *�

7. To me, O lords of sacrifice, in the breaking of the dawn, inthe flashing of the ray, in the force of the gods, to my winepressed out as if9 by men with hands come racing with yourtrampling steeds, O gods who bring, — to the pilgrim of theLight.10

8 The divine force of the Truth-conscious being, called in the next verse “the force ofthe gods”; the Vast, br.hat, is the constant description of that plane or “wide world”, —the Truth, the Right, the Vast.9 “As if”, — showing, as often, that the wine and its pressing are figures and sym-

bols.10 Arcananas, he who travels to the illumination created by the word, the significantname of the Rishi of this hymn, one of the line of Atri.

The Fourth Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE LORDS OF THE JOURNEY

[The Rishi invokes the two great increasers of the truth in ourbeing to lead us in our journey to the plenitudes, to the vastnessof our true existence which they conquer for us out of the narrowlimits of our present ignorant and imperfect mentality.]

yE�ck�t s s� +t� d�'v�A s b�vFt� n� vzZo y�y df'to Em�o vA vnt� Egr� � ��

1. He who has awakened to the knowledge, becomes perfectin will; let him speak for us among the gods: Varuna of thevision and Mitra take delight in his words.

tA Eh )��Wvc'sA rAjAnA dFG')� �mA tA s�ptF !tAv� D !tAvAnA jn�jn� � ��

2. They are the Kings most glorious in light and most far intheir hearing;1 they are the masters of being in creature andcreature and the increasers of the Truth in us, for the Truthis theirs.

tA vAEmyAno�vs� p� vA' up b��v� scA �v�vAs� s� c�t� nA vAjA& aEB dAvn� � ��

3. Travelling on the path I call to them, the twain together,the ancient and first; with perfect steeds2 as we travel we

1 They have the divine sight and the divine hearing, the Light and the Word.2 As usual, the symbol of the dynamic energies, life-powers, etc., by which our will

and works and aspiration proceed.


call to them, the perfect in knowledge, for the giving of theplenitudes.

Em�o a�hoE�cdAd� z 0yAy gAt�� vnt� Em��y Eh t� v't� s� mEtrE�t EvDt� � ��

4. Even out of our narrow existence Mitra conquers for us thevastness, he conquers the path to our home; for the per-fect mind3 is of Mitra when he harmonises all and hastensforward through to the goal.

vy� Em��yAvEs �yAm s T�tm� an�hs��voty� s�A vzZf�qs� � "�

5. May we abide in the increasing of Mitra which gives us ourperfect breadth; then are we free from hurt and sin, fosteredby thee, children of the Lord of Wideness.

y� v� Em��m� jn� ytT� s� c nyT� mA mGon� pEr Hyt� mo a�mAkm� qFZA� gopFT� n uz�ytm� � (�

6. You twain, O Mitra, set this human creature travelling onyour path and wholly you lead him. Set not your hedgearound our lords of plenitude and our seers of the truth.Guard us in our drinking of the light.4

3 Amhoh. , the narrowness full of suffering and evil, is the unenlightened state of ourlimited mentality; the perfect mentality, sumati, given by the grace of Mitra admits usto the wideness.4 Go, the Light or the Cow, meaning here the “milk” or yield of the Mother of Light.

The Fifth Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE GIVERS OF SELF-RULE

[The Rishi invokes Varuna, the vast form of the Truth, andMitra the beloved, godhead of its harmonies and large bliss,who conquer for us the perfect force of our true and infinitebeing, to change our imperfect human nature into the image oftheir divine workings. Then the solar Heaven of the Truth ismanifested within us, its wide pasture of herding illuminationsbecomes the field of journeying of our chariots, the high thoughtsof the seers, their purified discernment, their rapid inspirationsbecome ours, our very earth becomes the world of that vastTruth. For then there is the perfect movement, the transcendenceof this darkness of sin and suffering. We arrive at self-empire, arich, full and vast possession of our infinite being.]

aA EcEktAn s� +t� d�vO mt' ErfAdsA vzZAy !tp�fs� dDFt ys� mh� � ��

1. O mortal who awakenest to knowledge, call to thee thetwo godheads who are perfect in will and destroyers of thyenemy. Direct your thoughts to Varuna of whom Truth isthe form and to the great Delight.1

tA Eh 0�mEv�� t� sMygs� y'mAfAt� aD v�t�v mAn� q� �vZ' DAEy df'tm� � ��

1 The satisfaction given by Mitra, founding the large bliss of the Truth-plane. Varunaof the infinities gives the wide form, Mitra of the harmonies the perfect joy of the energiesof the Truth, its complete mightiness.


2. For it is they who attain to the undistorted force and theentire mightiness. Then shall thy humanity become as if theworkings of these gods; it is as if the visible heaven of light2

were founded in thee.

tA vAm�q� rTAnAm� vF: g4y� Etm�qAm� rAth4y�y s� �V� Et� dD� /�tom�m'nAmh� � ��

3. Therefore you, O gods, I desire, — for the rushing of thesechariots your wide pasture of the herds. Forcefully by ourhymns our minds seize on his perfect affirmation when thegod receives our bounteous offerings.

aDA Eh kA4yA y� v� d0�y p� EB'r\� tA En k�t� nA jnAnA� Eck�T� p� td0sA � ��

4. Then indeed, O transcendent godheads, you conquer theseer-wisdoms by the full floodings of the illumined discern-ment; you perceive knowledge for these human creatures bya perception in which the judgment is purified.

td� t� p� ETEv b� hQC� veq !qFZAm� �ysAnAvr� p� LvEt 0rEt yAmEB� � "�

5. O wide Earth, that Vast, that Truth for the movement ofinspired knowledge of the sages! Widely the Twain speedwith full capacity, our chariots pass streaming beyond3 intheir travellings.

aA y�AmFyc0sA Em� vy� c s� ry� 4yEc�W� bh� pA�y� yt�mEh �vrA?y� � (�

2 Or Swar of the vision, the world of light where is the full vision of the Truth.3 Beyond the darkness and the enemies, the suffering and evil of the lower existence.


6. When, O Mitra, you have your far-voyaging vision andwe are the illumined seers, may we arrive in the effort ofour journey to a self-empire4 spread out widely open andgoverning its multitudes.

4 Swarajya. Swarajya and Samrajya, perfect empire within and without, rule of ourinner being and mastery of our environment and circumstances, was the ideal of theVedic sages, attainable only by ascending beyond our mortal mentality to the luminousTruth of our being, the supramental infinities on the spiritual plane of our existence.

The Sixth Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE TWIN UPHOLDERS AND PROTECTORS

[Mitra and Varuna perfect the vastness of the superconscientbeing which is the object of sacrifice; they possess the full abun-dance of its force. When they reach that luminous origin andhome, they give men, labourers in the sacrificial work, its peaceand bliss; on the way to it they protect the mortal from hisspiritual enemies who would stand in the way of his immortality;for they keep firm to their higher workings and to the seats ofthe higher consciousness to which those workings belong andto which man rises in his ascent; universal and all-knowing theydestroy these enemies who are the forces of egoism and limitingignorance. True in their being, they are the powers that possessand touch the Truth in each individual being; leaders of thejourney and the battle they create the wideness of that higherconsciousness even out of our narrow and distressed mortality. Itis that highest which the thought in the Atris desires and reachesto by affirming Mitra, Varuna and Aryaman, the godheads, inthe “bodies” inhabited by the human soul.]

bE1�TA d�v En�k� tmAEd�yA yjt� b� ht� vzZ Em�Ay'mvEq'�W� 0�mAfAT� � ��

1. In truth, O godheads, ye two sons of the infinite Mother,rightly perfected by you is the Vastness for which we sac-rifice. O Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, you possess its mostabundant force.

aA y%oEn� Ehr yy� vzZ Em� sdT� DtA'rA cq'ZFnA� yt� s� 7� ErfAdsA � ��


2. When you enter into your original home of golden light,O Varuna, O Mitra, upholders of men in their labour,destroyers of the enemy, reach for them the bliss.

Ev�v� Eh Ev�vv�dso vzZo Em�o ay'mA v�tA pd�v sE�cr� pAEt m�y: Erq� � ��

3. Universal and all-knowing are Varuna and Mitra and Arya-man; they keep firm to the law of their workings, even as tothe seats to which they arrive, and guard mortal man fromhis foes.

t� Eh s�yA !t�p� f !tAvAno jn�jn� s� nFTAs� s� dAnvo��hoE�cd� zc+y� � ��

4. For because they are true in their being, they touch the Truthand hold the Truth in creature and creature; perfect leadersin the journey, perfect in force for the battle, they create thewideness even out of this narrow being.

ko n� vA� Em�A�t� to vzZo vA tn� nAm� t�s� vAm�qt� mEtrE��y eqt� mEt� � "�

5. Which of you, O Mitra, is unaffirmed, thou or Varuna, inour bodies?1 Wholly our thought seeks That from you, Thatfor the Enjoyers2 our Thought desires.

1 Not the physical body only; the soul dwells here in five sheaths or embodyings.2 The Atris, — literally, eaters; the word may also mean Travellers.

The Seventh Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE LORDS OF THE GREAT FORCE

[Because they hold the great battle-force of the Truth, Mitraand Varuna lead us to the vastness of that Truth. By that forcethey rule all imperially, contain the Truth’s clarities and theirpowers are manifested in all the godheads. Therefore shouldthey put forth their power in these godheads for the humanpossession of the great felicity and wealth of the Truth in earthand heaven. They reach the Truth by the Truth; for they haveits discernment full of the impulsion that goes straight to theknowledge; therefore they increase divinely without falling intothe harms of the Ignorance. As lords of that powerful impulsionthey bring down the heavens in a luminous rain upon the mortaland take possession of the vast as a home.]

vo Em�Ay gAyt vzZAy EvpA EgrA mEh0�Av� t� b� ht� � ��

1. Sing ye to Mitra and Varuna with the word that enlightens;because they have that great force, theirs is the Truth, theVast.

sm�AjA yA G� tyonF Em��coBA vzZ�c d�vA d�v�q� f�tA � ��

2. All-rulers are they, yes, both of them, Mitra and Varuna,homes of the clarity, gods, manifested by the word in thegods.

tA n� f/t� pAET'v�y mho rAyo Ed4y�y mEh vA� 0�� d�v�q� � ��


3. Therefore put forth strength for our great felicity1 heavenlyand earthly; for great is your force in the gods.

!tm� t�n spt�Eqr� d0mAfAt� ad� � hA d�vO vD�'t� � ��

4. By the Truth you attain knowledge of the Truth, you possessa judgment of impelling force;2 O gods, you grow and comenot to hurt.

v� E�V%AvA rF�yAp�q�ptF dAn� m�yA� b� ht� gt'mAfAt� � "�

5. Turning heaven to rain, winners of the streaming movement,masters of that forceful impulsion, you take possession ofyour vast home.

1 The felicity or happy wealth of the wide Truth-consciousness manifested not only inthe higher mental planes of our consciousness, but in our physical being.2 The straight impulsion which the gods possess; man, moving from the ignorance to

the Truth by the ignorance, follows a crooked and wavering movement, has a judgmentdistressed by the falsehood and in his growth stumbles constantly into sin and suffering.By the growth of the gods in him, he is able to move without stumbling and sufferingfrom Truth to greater Truth, straight, felicitously.

The Eighth Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE HOLDERS OF THE LUMINOUS WORLDS

[The Rishi invokes Mitra and Varuna as the upholders of theworlds or planes of being, especially the three luminous worldsin which the triple mental, the triple vital, the triple physicalfind the light of their truth and the divine law of their powers.The strength of the Aryan warrior is increased by them andguarded in that imperishable law. From the luminous worldsthe rivers of the truth descend with their yield of bliss. In each ofthem a luminous Purusha fertilises a form of the triple thought-consciousness of the Truth; these, which make the luminous dayof the soul, found in man the divine and infinite consciousnessand in that the divine peace and the activity by which in theextended universality of our being there is the rich felicity andthe creation of the godhead. The divine workings are impairedand restricted by the gods in the ordinary life of the vital andthe physical being, but when Mitra and Varuna uphold in usthe luminous worlds in which each of these finds its truth andpower, they become complete and firm for ever.]

�F rocnA vzZ �F&zt %� n� �FEZ Em� DAryTo rjA�Es vAv� DAnAvmEt� 0E�y�yA�n� v�t� r0mAZAvj� y'm� � ��

1. Three worlds of the Light you two uphold, O Varuna, threeheavens, three mid-worlds, O Mitra, and you increase themight of the Warrior and guard him in the imperishable lawof your working.

irAvtFv'zZ D�nvo vA� mD� md� vA� EsDvo Em� d� �� y�t�T� v�'qBAsE�ts� ZA� EDqZAnA� r�toDA Ev %� mt� � ��


2. Your fostering cows1 have their streams, O Varuna, O Mitra,the rivers milk out their honeyed yield. There stand widethree luminous Bulls2 and cast their seed into the threeThoughts.

Atd�'vFmEdEt� johvFEm m2y�Edn uEdtA s� y'�y rAy� Em�AvzZA sv'tAt�1� tokAy tnyAy f� yo� � ��

3. In the dawn I call to the divine Mother infinite, in the mid-day and at the rising of the sun. I desire of Mitra and Varunathe peace and the movement in the forming of the all3 forfelicity and for the creation and the begetting.4

yA DtA'rA rjso rocn�yotAEd�yA Ed4yA pAET'v�y n vA� d�vA am� tA aA EmnEt v�tAEn Em�AvzZA D��vAEZ � ��

4. Because you are the upholders of the luminous sphere of themid-world and the luminous sphere of the earth, O divineSons of Infinity, O Mitra and Varuna, the immortal godsimpair not your workings which are firm for ever.5

1 Dhenavah. , the rivers of the Truth, as gavah. , the luminous cows, are the rays of itslight.2 The Bull is the Purusha, soul or conscious being; the Cow is the Prakriti, the power

of consciousness. The creation of the godhead, the Son, comes by the fertilising of thetriple luminous consciousness by the triple luminous soul of the Truth-being so that thathigher consciousness becomes active, creative and fruitful in man.3 The action of the sacrifice consists in the formation or “extension” of the universal

being, sarvatati, and of the divine being, devatati.4 Of the Son, the godhead created within the humanity.5 That is, in the ordinary workings of the life-plane and the material plane, because

they are unilluminated, full of ignorance and defect, the law of our divine and infinitebeing is impaired or spoiled, works under restrictions and with perversions; it manifestsfully, steadfastly and faultlessly only when the ideal, supramental truth-plane is upheldin us by the pure wideness and harmony of Varuna and Mitra and takes up the vital andthe physical consciousness into its power and light.

The Ninth Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

THE INCREASERS OF BEING AND DELIVERERS

[The Rishi desires the wide and multiple fostering of our beingand its powers which Varuna and Mitra give and their completeimpulsion of our strength towards the perfect foundation of thedivine status. He prays to them to protect and deliver him fromthe Destroyers and prevent their adverse control from impairingthe growth of the godhead in our various sheaths or bodies.]

p� #zZA Ecd� 2y��yvo n� n� vA� vzZ Em� v�Es vA� s� mEtm� � ��

1. Multiple indeed by the wideness1 is now your fostering ofour being, O Varuna. O Mitra, I would enjoy your perfect-mindedness.

tA vA� sMygd� � h� vAZ�qm�yAm DAys� vy� t� zd� A �yAm � ��

2. You are they who betray not to harm;2 may we enjoy yourcomplete force of impulsion for our founding; may we bethey, O you violent godheads.

pAt� no zd� A pAy� EBzt �Ay�TA� s� �A�A t� yA'm d�y� n� tn� EB� � ��

1 The wideness of the infinite Truth-plane with the manifold wealth of its spiritualcontents. Its condition is the perfection of the thought-mind and psychic mentalityproper to a divine nature, which comes to man as the grace of the gods, sumati.2 The harms of the Dasyus, destroyers of our being and enemies of its divine progress,

the sons of Limitation and Ignorance.


3. Protect us, O violent ones,3 with your protectings and de-liver us with a perfect deliverance. May we in our embody-ings break through the Destroyers.

mA k�yA\� t+t� y0� B� j�mA tn� EB� mA f�qsA mA tnsA � ��

4. O transcendent in will-power, let us not in our embodyingssuffer the control of any,4 nor in our begetting, nor ourcreation.

3 Rudras. Rudra is the Divine as the master of our evolution by violence and battle,smiting and destroying the Sons of Darkness and the evil they create in man. Varuna andMitra as helpers in the upward struggle against the Dasyus assume this Rudrahood.4 That is, any of the Destroyers.

The Tenth Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

AN INVOCATION TO THE SACRIFICE

[The Rishi invokes Mitra and Varuna to the Soma offering asdestroyers of the enemy and greateners of our being and ashelpers of our thoughts by their mastery and wisdom.]

aA no gt� ErfAdsA vzZ Em� bh'ZA up�m� cAzm2vrm� � ��

1. O destroyers of the Enemy, come with your greatenings,1 OVaruna, O Mitra, to this our delightful sacrifice.

Ev�v�y Eh c�tsA vzZ Em� rAjT� IfAnA Ep@yt� EDy� � ��

2. O Varuna, O Mitra, you govern every man and are the wisethinkers; you are the rulers, nourish our thoughts.

up n� s� tmA gt� vzZ Em� dAf� q� a�y som�y pFty� � ��

3. Come, O Varuna, O Mitra, to our Soma offering, to thesacrifice of the giver, that you may drink of this wine.

1 By destroying the enemy, the hurters, who pervert and diminish our being, will andknowledge, they increase in us the largenesses proper to the “vast Truth”. When theygovern, the control of the Dasyus is removed and the knowledge of the Truth increasesin our thoughts.

The Eleventh Hymn to Mitra-Varuna

AN INVOCATION TO THE SACRIFICE

[The Rishi invokes Mitra and Varuna to the sacrifice as thegodheads who lead man on the path according to the law of thetruth and confirm our spiritual gains by its workings.]

aA Em�� vzZ� vy� gFEB'j�'h� mo aE�vt� En bEh'Eq sdt� sompFty� � ��

1. With the words we sacrifice to Mitra and to Varuna as theAtri.Sit on the seat of the largeness for the drinking of the wine.

v�t�n �To D��v0�mA Dm'ZA yAty?jnA En bEh'Eq sdt� sompFty� � ��

2. By your working you keep firm the gettings of good and youmake men to walk the path by your law.Sit on the seat of the largeness for the drinking of the wine.

Em��c no vzZ�c j� q�tA� y�Em�Vy� En bEh'Eq sdtA� sompFty� � ��

3. May Mitra and Varuna take delight in our sacrifice that wemay have our desire.Sit on the seat of the largeness for the drinking of the wine.

Hymn to Varuna

[In this hymn there is throughout a sustained double sense. Inthe exoteric Varuna is hymned as the Asura, omniscient andomnipotent lord and creator, the Godhead in his creative wis-dom and might forming the world and maintaining the law ofthings in the earth and mid-air and heavens. In the esoteric, inwhich the physical phenomena of the exoteric become symbols,the infinite Godhead is hymned in his all-pervading wisdomand purity opening the three worlds of our being to the Sun ofknowledge, pouring down the streams of the Truth, purifyingthe soul from the falsehood of the lower being and its sin. Thehymn is rendered here successively in its exoteric and its esotericsignificance.]

(1)

TO THE OMNISCIENT CREATOR

sm�Aj� b� hdcA' gBFr� b�L E y� vzZAy )� tAy Ev yo jGAn fEmt�v cmo'pE�tr� p� ETvF� s� yA'y � ��

l. Sing thou the word vast and profound and dear to renownedVaruna, the All-ruler, to him who clove away, even as thecleaver of beasts a skin, that he might spread out the earthunder the sun.

vn�q� 4ytEr0� ttAn vAjmv'�s� py uE5yAs� 3�s� +t�� vzZo a@�vE�n� EdEv s� y'mdDA�sommd� O � ��

2. He spread out the mid-air on the tree-tops, he put strength in


the battle-steeds and milk in the cows; in hearts he put will,the fire in the waters,1 the sun in heaven and the Soma-planton the mountain.

nFcFnbAr� vzZ� kvD� ssj' rodsF atEr0m� t�n Ev�v�y B� vn�y rAjA yv� n v� E�V4y�'nE� B� m � ��

3. Varuna poured forth over earth and heaven and the mid-airthe holder of the waters whose windows open downward;by him the King of all the world floods the earth as the rainfloods a field of barley.

unE� B� Em� p� ETvFm� t %A� ydA d� �D� vzZo v�XAEdt� smB��Z vst pv'tAs�tEvqFyt� )Tyt vFrA� � ��

4. Varuna floods the wide earth and heaven, yea, when hedesires the milk of heaven, he pours it forth; the mountainsare clothed utterly with cloud, the heroes of storm2 put forththeir strength and all is cast down before them.

imAm� �vAs� r�y )� t�y mhF� mAyA� vzZ�y vocm� mAn�n�v tE�TvA& atEr0� Ev yo mm� p� ETvF� s� y�'Z � "�

5. I have declared this vast creative wisdom3 of the famous andmighty One, even Varuna, he who stood in mid-air as witha measuring-rod and wide he measured out the earth withthe sun.

imAm� n� kEvtm�y mAyA� mhF� d�v�y nEkrA dDq' ek� yd� �A n p� Z�y�nFrAEs`tFrvny� sm� d� m� � (�

1 Sayana explains, either the electric fire in the water of the clouds or the submarinefire in the ocean.2 Vırah. , the Heroes, here the Maruts as storm-gods.3 Maya, with a strong sense of its root-significance, to measure, form, build or plan

out.


6. Vast is this wisdom of the divine and the greatest of seersand there is none who can do violence against it; thereforethe Ocean is one, yet all these rushing rivers pour themselvesinto it and cannot fill it.

ay'My� vzZ Em{y� vA sKAy� vA sdEmd� B�Atr� vA v�f� vA En�y� vzZArZ� vA y�sFmAg�ck� mA Ef)T�tt� � *�

7. Whatsoever sin we have done against the law of Aryaman orthe law of Mitra, against brother or friend, against constantneighbour or enemy,4 cast it away from us, O Varuna.

EktvAso yEd� Erp� n' dFEv y�A GA s�ym� t y� Ev� svA' tA Ev �y EfETr�v d�vA�DA t� �yAm vzZ E yAs� � ,�

8. The sin we have done like cunning gamesters who breakthe law of the play, or have done against the truth or whatwe have sinned in ignorance, all these cleave far from us, Ogod, like loose-hanging fruits: then shall we be beloved ofthee, O Varuna.

(2)

THE MIGHTY MASTER OF INFINITE WISDOM

[The Rishi hymns Varuna as the Lord of infinite purity andwisdom who opens our earthly being to the unclouded light ofthe sun of knowledge, pours out the waters of the Truth upon allour triple existence mental, vital and physical and by its powerremoves all sin and evil and falsehood from our lives. He createsthe free wideness of our vital being above our broken searchfor the delightful objects of our desire, sets the plenitude in ourbattling life-forces, the yield of heaven in the shining herds of

4 Or, stranger.


thought; he has put will in our hearts, Agni the divine forcein the waters of existence, the Sun of divine knowledge in thehighest heaven of mind and the plant that yields the wine ofdelight on the many-plateaued mountain of our being. All theseare the means by which we attain to immortality. He plans outall our physical existence by his wisdom according to the truth-light of the sun of knowledge and creates in us the unity of hisown infinite existence and consciousness with all the seven riversof the Truth-plane pouring their streams of knowledge into itwithout filling its infinity.]

1. To Varuna of the far-heard inspirations, the all-ruling,5 singbright the inspired word of the soul in its vastness and depthand delight; for he has cloven wide away the darkness, asone that cleaves away a skin, that he may spread out ourearth under his illumining sun.6

2. He has spread wide the mid-world above the forests of earth-delight;7 he has put his plenitude in our battle-steeds of life8

and their heavenly milk in our shining herds of knowledge.9

Varuna has put the will10 in our hearts, the divine fire11 inthe waters,12 the Sun of Light in our heavens, the plant ofDelight on the mountain of our being.13

3. Varuna has poured forth over our earth and heaven and

5 The two epithets are intended to give the two sides of the divine being, all-knowledgeand all-power; mayam asurasya srutasya. Man divinising himself has to become in theimage of the godhead seer and king.6 The limitations of the physical mentality are rolled away and it is spread out in a

great wideness to receive the revelations and inspirations of the light of the gnosis.7 The forests or delightful growths of earth (vana means also pleasure) are the basis of

the mid-world, the vital world in us which is the realm of Vayu, the Life-God. That isthe world of the satisfaction of desires. This also is spread out in its full wideness, freefrom limitation, to receive the Ananda or divine delight by means of the knowledge andlaw of the Truth.8 Arvatsu, meaning both “battlers, strivers” and “horses”.9 Usriyasu, meaning both “bright ones” and “cows”.

10 Kratu, the will to the divine work, the sacrificial will.11 Agni, the fire of the divine Will which receives the sacrifice and becomes its priest.12 The ocean of being or else the waters of Truth which descend from above.13 Our existence is compared always to a mountain with many plateaus, each a level orplane of being.


mid-world the holder of wisdom with his doors openingdownward;14 with him the king of all our being floods ourearth like rain flooding the barley.

4. He floods our earth in its wideness and our heaven, yea,Varuna when he desires that milk,15 pours it forth; themountains are covered with the cloud, his heroes16 put forththeir strength and cast it away.

5. Vast is this wisdom which I declare of Varuna the far-heard,the mighty Lord, for he stands in our mid-world as with ameasuring-rod and wide he measures out our earth with hisillumining Sun.17

6. Vast is this wisdom of the godhead greatest in seer-knowl-edge and none can do violence to it; for into him, the one,the ocean, the bright fostering rivers18 pour their waters, yetthey cannot fill him.

7. All the sin that we have done against thee in thy power ofAryaman or thy power of Mitra or as brother or friend orthe eternal indweller or the warrior,19 that cast away fromus.

8. The sin we have done as cunning gamesters offend in theirplay, our sin against the truth and our sin by ignorance, allthese cleave away like loosened things; then may we be dearto thee, O Varuna.

14 The gnosis opens upward to receive the Infinite in its will and knowledge; here itsdoors open downwards to flood the lower being.15 The milk of the Cow Aditi, the infinite consciousness.16 The Maruts as life-powers attaining to full thought-knowledge; they help Indra tobreak the cloud or coverer, Vritra, and pour out the waters of Truth and also to bringthe light hidden by Vala, that of the hidden sun. Here the two ideas are combined inanother image.17 Man lives in the physical being; Varuna brings the light of the gnosis into it andmeasures it out, that is, shapes and plans out our earth-existence in the measures of theTruth by means of the mind enlightened by the sun of gnosis: he takes his stand as theAsura in our vital plane, the link between mental and physical, there to receive the lightand pass it on to the earth as a creative and determining force.18 The seven rivers that descend from the Truth-plane, here called avanayah. , which hasthe same root-sense as dhenavah. , the fostering cows.19 Against the Dasyus.

The First Hymn to the Dawn

[The Rishi prays for the full epiphany of the Dawn of the light ofTruth in all its lavish splendour, with all the bountiful companiesof its gods and seers, the shining herds of its thought, the rushingsteeds of its force, the luminous impulsions with which it comes— companioned, as they are, by the burning rays of the Sun ofgnosis. Let the Dawn arrive and the work will no longer be longand tardy.]

mh� no a% boDyoqo rAy� EdEv�mtF yTA Ec�o aboDy� s�y)vEs vA�y� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � ��

1. O Dawn, come with all thy splendours of heaven, awaken ustoday to the great felicity, even as once thou awakenedst us,— in the sonhood of the birth of knowledge, in the inspiredhearing of the Truth.1

O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

yA s� nFT� fOcd� T� 4yOQCo d� EhtEd'v� sA 4y� QC shFyEs s�y)vEs vA�y� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � ��

2. Thou who breakest forth into dawning, O daughter ofheaven, in him who has the perfect leading of the flamingchariot of light,2 so break forth today, — O greater still inthy force, in the sonhood of the birth of knowledge, in theinspired hearing of the Truth.

1 The name of the Rishi is here a covert figure for the characteristics of the Sun-birthin man.2 The same figure, with another name; it gives the result of the Sun-birth.



sA no a%ABr�s� 4y�'QCA d� EhtEd'v� yo 4yOQC� shFyEs s�y)vEs vA�y� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � ��

3. Break forth into light a bearer of treasures, O daughterof heaven, as once thou brokest forth, — O greater still inthy force, in the sonhood of the birth of knowledge, in theinspired hearing of the Truth.O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

aEB y� �vA EvBAvEr �tom�g�'ZEt v^y� mG�m'GoEn s� E)yo dAmvt� s� rAty� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � ��

4. There are bearers of the sacrifice3 who bring thee out intheir speech, by their hymns they manifest thee, O wide andlustrous Dawn; they are glorious with thy plenty, O queen,their gifts are lavish, their boons are full.O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

yEQcEd� D t� gZA im� CdyEt mG�y� pEr Ec��Vyo dD� d'dto rADo a�y� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � "�

5. When these companies of thy godheads seek to pleasure theein hope of thy plenitudes, they set their desires all around,they lavish thy undeviating felicity.O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

3 Not human priests, but divine powers, the hosts or companies of the Dawn, “gan.as”,at once priests, seers and patrons of the inner sacrifice, winners and givers of the celestialwealth.


e�q� DA vFrv%f uqo mGoEn s� Erq� y� no rADA��y�yA mGvAno arAst s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � (�

6. These are thy seers; O Dawn, queen of plenty, set in themthe splendour of thy heroic powers; lords of thy plenty, theyshall lavish on us thy undeviating riches.O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

t��yo %� 7� b� h%f uqo mGoyA vh y� no rADA��y�4yA g4yA Bjt s� ry� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � *�

7. O Dawn, our lady of plenty, bring to them thy illumination,a vast glory; they shall give us enjoyment of the felicity ofthy steeds and the felicity of thy herds.O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

ut no gomtFErq aA vhA d� EhtEd'v� sAk� s� y'�y rE�mEB� f� +�� focE\rEc'EB� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � ,�

8. Bring to us too, O daughter of heaven, powers of impulsefull of the troopings of thy light; let them come companionedwith the rays of thy Sun, linked with the purity of his brightand burning light-givings.O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

4y� QCA d� EhtEd'vo mA Ecr� tn� TA ap� n�t� �vA �t�n� yTA Erp�� tpAEt s� ro aEc'qA s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � -�

9. Break forth into light, O daughter of heaven! And spin notout too long the work. For thee thy sun afflicts not with his


burning ray as he afflicts the foe and the thief.4


etAv��d� q��v� B� yo vA dAt� mh'Es yA �tot� �yo EvBAvy�'QCtF n mFys� s� jAt� a�vs� n� t� � �.�

10. So much thou shouldst give or more than this; for to thyadorers thou breakest forth into the full wideness of thyglories and thou art not limited in thy dawning.O, thy birth is complete! O, truth is in the tramp of thysteeds!

4 The labour towards the being of the Truth is long and tedious, because the powersof darkness and division, the lower powers of our being, seize on and appropriate, keepidle or misuse the gains of the knowledge. They are not bearers of the sacrifice, but itsspoilers; they are hurt by the full ray of the sun. But this Dawn of knowledge can bearthe full illumination and bring to a rapid conclusion the great work.

The Second Hymn to the Dawn

[The Rishi hymns the divine Dawn, daughter of Heaven, as thebringer of the Truth, the bliss, the heavens of light, creator ofthe Light, giver of vision, maker, follower, leader of the pathsof Truth, remover of the darkness, the eternal and ever youthfulgoddess of our godward journeying.]

%� t%AmAn� b� htFm� t�n !tAvrFmzZ@s�� EvBAtFm� d�vFm� qs� �vrAvhtF� Et Ev Aso mEtEBj'rt� � ��

1. Dawn of the luminous journey, Dawn queen of truth, largewith the Truth, how wide is the gleam from her rosy limbs,— Dawn divine who brings with her the heaven of light!Her the seers adore with their thoughts.

eqA jn� df'tA boDytF s� gApT� k� vtF yA�yg�� b� hd� TA b� htF Ev�vEmvoqA ?yoEty'QC�yg�� a^Am� � ��

2. This is she who has the vision and she awakens man andmakes his paths easy to travel and walks in his front. Howlarge is her chariot, how vast and all-pervading the goddess,how she brings Light in the front of the days!

eqA goEBrzZ�EBy�'jAnA�5�DtF rEym Ay� c+� pTo rdtF s� EvtAy d�vF p� z�V� tA Ev�vvArA Ev BAEt � ��

3. This is she who yokes her cows of rosy light; her journeydoes not fail and such is the treasure she makes that it passesnot away. She hews out our paths to happiness; divine is she,far-shining her glory, many the hymns that rise to her, shebrings with her every boon.


eqA 4y�nF BvEt E�bhA' aAEv�k� vAnA tv� p� r�tAt� !t�y pTAmv�Et sAD� jAntFv n Edfo EmnAEt � ��

4. Behold her in her biune energy of earth and heaven, how shecomes into being in her whiteness and discloses her body inour front. She follows perfectly the paths of Truth, as onewho is wise and knows, and she hedges not in our regions.

eqA f� B�A n tvo EvdAno2v�'v �AtF d� fy� no a�TAt� ap ��qo bADmAnA tmA��y� qA Edvo d� EhtA ?yoEtqAgAt� � "�

5. Lo, how brilliant is her body when she is found and known!how she stands on high as if bathing in light that we mayhave vision! Driving away all enemies and all darknessesDawn, the daughter of Heaven, has come with the Light.

eqA tFcF d� EhtA Edvo n6 yoq�v Bd� A En ErZFt� a@s� 4y� v'tF dAf� q� vAyA'EZ p� n?yo'Ety�'vEt� p� v'TAk� � (�

6. Lo, the daughter of Heaven like a woman full of happinessmoves to meet the gods and her form travels ever nearerto them. Unveiling all blessings for the giver of sacrifice thegoddess young for ever has created the Light once more evenas in the beginning.

A Hymn to Savitri

[The Rishi hymns the Sun-God as the source of divine knowledgeand the creator of the inner worlds. To him, the Seer, the seekersof light yoke their mind and thoughts; he, the one knower of allforms of knowledge, is the one supreme ordainer of the sacrifice.He assumes all forms as the robes of his being and his creativesight and creates the supreme good and happiness for the twoforms of life in the worlds. He manifests the heavenly world,shining in the path of the dawn of divine knowledge; in that paththe other godheads follow him and it is his greatness of light thatthey make the goal of all their energies. He has measured outfor us our earthly worlds by his power and greatness: but it is inthe three worlds of light that he attains to his real greatness ofmanifestation in the rays of the divine sun; then he encompassesthe night of our darkness with his being and his light and be-comes Mitra who by his laws produces the luminous harmonyof our higher and lower worlds. Of all our creation he is the oneauthor, and by his forward marches he is its increaser until thewhole world of our becoming grows full of his illumination.]

y� Rt� mn ut y� Rt� EDyo Ev A Ev �y b� hto EvpE�ct� Ev ho�A dD� vy� nAEvd�k imhF d�v�y sEvt� � pEr�V� Et� � ��

l. The illumined yoke their mind and they yoke their thoughtsto the illumined godhead, to the vast, to the luminous in con-sciousness; the one knower of all manifestation of knowl-edge, he alone orders the things of the sacrifice. Great is thepraise of Savitri, the creating godhead.

Ev�vA #pAEZ Et m� `t� kEv� AsAvFd� Bd�� E�pd� ct� �pd� Ev nAkmHyt� sEvtA vr� yo�n� yAZm� qso Ev rAjEt � ��


2. All forms are robes the Seer puts on that he may create thegood and bliss for the double and the quadruple1 creature.Savitri describes by his light our heavenly world; supremeis he and desirable, wide is the light of his shining in themarch of the Dawn.

y�y yAZmvy id� yy� d�'vA d�v�y mEhmAnmojsA y� pAET'vAEn Evmm� s etfo rjA�Es d�v� sEvtA mEh�vnA � ��

3. And in that march all the other gods in their might followafter the greatness of this godhead. This is that bright godSavitri who by his power and greatness has measured outour earthly worlds of light.

ut yAEs sEvt��FEZ rocnot s� y'�y rE�mEB� sm� QyEs ut rA�Fm� Byt� prFys ut Em�o BvEs d�v Dm'EB� � ��

4. But also thou goest, O Savitri, to the three shining worldsof heaven and thou art made manifest by the rays of theSun, and thou encirclest on both sides the Night, and thoubecomest Mitra, O god, with his settled laws of Truth.

ut�Efq� sv�y �vm�k id� t p� qA BvEs d�v yAmEB� ut�d� Ev�v� B� vn� Ev rAjEs �yAvA�v�t� sEvt� �tommAnf� � "�

5. And thou alone hast power for the creation and thoubecomest the Increaser, O god, by thy marchings in thypath, and thou illuminest all this world of the becoming.Shyavashwa, O Savitri, has found the affirmation of thygodhead.

1 Literally, two-footed and four-footed, but pad also means the step, the principle onwhich the soul founds itself. The esoteric meaning is four-principled, those who dwellin the fourfold principle of the lower world, and two-principled, those who dwell in thedouble principle of the divine and the human.

Part Four

Other Hymns

A Vedic Hymn

Rig Veda VII.60

O Sun, O Light, because today blameless in thy rising thou hastdeclared the Truth to the Lord of Love and the Lord of Purity, somay we abide in the godhead, dear to thee, O Mother infinite,dear to thee, O Lord of Strength, in all our speaking. O Mitra, OVaruna, this is he that seeth for the soul, the Sun that rises overearth and heaven in the pervading wideness, and he guards allthat is in motion and all that is stable; for he beholds the straightthings and the crooked in mortals. Seven shining energies hasthis Bright One yoked today in the world of our achievement andthey bear him on in their clarity, and he beholds the homes ofthe soul and the places of its birth like a herdsman who watchesover his herds.

Upward rise your honied satisfactions; for our sun hasclimbed into the ocean of pure Light and for him the Childrenof the Infinite hew out his paths, even the Lord of Love andthe Lord of Strength and the Lord of Purity in one harmony.These are they that discern and separate all the much falsehoodin us; they are the Lords of Love and Strength and Purity. Thesegrow in the house of Truth, puissant and unvanquished Sons ofthe Infinite. These are the Love and the Purity hard to represswho by their discernings give knowledge to him who has noknowledge; they bring to him their impulses of a will that hasright vision and they lead him by the good path beyond the evil.These with sleepless eyes see and know in his earth for manthat is ignorant and lead him: in his forward faring he comes tothe fathomless pit in the river, yet shall they bear him across tothe other shore of this wideness. The peace and the protectionand the happiness which the infinite Mother and the Lords ofLove and Purity give to the servant of the sacrifice, in that let us

560 Other Hymns

found all our creation and building, let us do no violence to thegodhead, O ye swift Wayfarers.

He whom the Lord of Purity upholds, puts away from hisaltar by the powers of sacrifice whatsoever hurters: cut away, OLord of Strength, from the servant of the sacrifice the hurt andthe division, form in him that vast other world, O givers of theabundance. A blazing strength and a world of illumination isthe coming together of these Godheads and they overcome bytheir near and approaching force. Lo, we quiver with the fearof you; set us at ease by the greatness of your discerning. Forwhen a man by sacrifice wins right-mindedness in the getting ofthe plenitude, in the conquest of the supreme Felicity, the strongWarriors, the Lords of the Treasure cleave to his heart of emotionand they form there the Vast for his dwelling-place making it ofa perfect temper. For you we have made in front this work ofthe divine representative in our sacrifices; lead us safe throughall difficult places. Keep us always with constant felicities.

yd% s� y' b�vo�nAgA u%Em�Ay vzZAy s�ym� vy� d�v�AEdt� �yAm tv E yAso ay'mn� g� Zt� � ��

eq �y Em�AvzZA n� c0A uB� ud�Et s� yo' aEB ?mn� Ev�v�y �TAt� j'gt�c gopA !j� mt�'q� v� EjnA c p�yn� � ��

ay� /t sJ hErt� sD�TA%A x vhEt s� y: G� tAcF� DAmAEn Em�AvzZA y� vAk� � s� yo y� T�v jEnmAEn c�V� � ��

u�A� p� 0Aso mD� mto a�T� rA s� yo' azhQC� +mZ'� y�mA aAEd�yA a2vno rdEt Em�o ay'mA vzZ� sjoqA� � ��

im� c�tAro an� t�y B� r�Em'�o ay'mA vzZo Eh sEt im !t�y vAv� D� d�'roZ� f�mAs� p� �A aEdt�rdNDA� � "�

im� Em�o vzZo d� 1BAso�c�ts� EcEQctyEt d0�� aEp +t�� s� c�ts� vttE�trE�cd�h� s� pTA nyEt � (�

A Vedic Hymn 561

im� Edvo aEnEmqA p� ET4yAE�cEk�vA�so ac�ts� nyEt v�Aj� Ec�%o gADmE�t pAr� no a�y EvE�pt�y pq'n� � *�

yd� gopAvdEdEt� fm' Bd�� Em�o yQCEt vzZ� s� dAs� tE�m�A tok� tny� dDAnA mA km' d�vh�1n� t� rAs� � ,�

av v�Ed� ho�AEBy'j�t Erp� kAE�c�zZD��t� s� pEr ��qoEBry'mA v� Z/t� z� s� dAs� v� qZA u lokm� � -�

s�vE�cEd� D sm� Et��v��y�qAmpFQy�n shsA sht� y� �mE\yA v� qZo r�jmAnA d0�y EcmEhnA m� 1tA n� � �.�

yo b�LZ� s� mEtmAyjAt� vAj�y sAtO prm�y rAy� sF0t my�� mGvAno ay' uz 0yAy cE+r� s� DAt� � ��

iy� d�v p� roEhEty�'v�yA� y��q� Em�AvzZAvkAEr Ev�vAEn d� gA' Epp� t� Etro no y� y� pAt �vE�tEB� sdA n� � ��

A Hymn of the Thought-Gods

The shining host has arisen in my soul, the host of the Thought-gods and they sing a hymn as they march upward, a hymn of theheart’s illumination. March thou on, O my soul, impetuously totheir violent and mighty music. For they are drunken with thejoy of an inspiration that betrays not to falsehood, because thetruth of eternal Nature is its guide. They are the comrades of afirm and blazing Light and in the force of the Light they workout their lofty aggressions; conquerors, violently they marchon their path, self-protecting they guard of themselves the soulagainst falsehood; for they are many and march without a gap intheir brilliant ranks. Violent are they as a herd of rushing bulls;the nights come against them, but they overleap the nights; theypossess the earth in our thoughts and they rise with them tothe heavens. No half-lights, no impotent things are they, butmighty in aggression and puissant to attain. Spears of light theyhold and they loose them from their hands at the children ofDarkness; the flashing lightnings of the Thought-gods searchthe night and the light of heaven rises of itself on our soulsat their battle-call. Truth is their shining strength; the hosts ofthe Thought-gods are the artificers of the soul and they fash-ion its immortality; themselves they yoke their coursers to thechariot of our life and they drive galloping to the joy that is itsgoal.

They have bathed their limbs in the waters of Parushni, inthe stream that has a multitude of currents, they have put on theirdivine raiment and now with the wheels of their chariots theybreak open all Nature’s secret caves. Sometimes they march ona thousand branching paths, sometimes they rush direct at theirgoal; sometimes their paths are within, sometimes they followoutward Nature’s thousand ways; the world-sacrifice fulfils itselfby the many names of their godhead and by their ever-widening

A Hymn of the Thought-Gods 563

march. Now they make themselves as galloping forces of ourlife, now they are gods and powers of the soul; at last theyput on forms of a supreme world, forms of vision, forms oflight. They have attained to the goal, they support the rhythmsof the world, chanting they weave their glorious dance roundthe very fountain of things; they are creators of supreme forms,they expand the soul in vision and make it a divine blaze oflight. For these are rushing seekers of the Truth; for the Truththeir lightnings stab and search; they are seers, they are creatorsand ordainers; their aggressions are inspired by the might andforce of heaven, therefore affirmed in our thoughts they speedcarrying us confidently on their way. When the mind is full ofthem, it is borne on towards godhead, for they have the radiantinspiration of the path.

Who has known the place of their birth or who has sat intheir high beatitudes? Who desires and seeks his Friend beyond?A Mother bore them many-hued in her soul and of her they tellhim; a Violent One was their Father whose impulse drives allbeings that are born, and him they reveal. Seven and seven theThought-gods came to me and seven times they gave a hundred-fold; in Yamuna I will bathe the shining herds of my thoughtswhich they have given, I will purify my swiftnesses in the riverof my soul.

Lo, they march on in their cohorts and their companies;let us follow in their steps with the pace of our thinkings. Forthey bear with them an imperishable seed of creation and thegrain of immortal forms and this if they plant in the fields ofthe soul, there shall grow as its harvest life universal and blisstranscendent. They will put by all that derides our aspirationand pass beyond all that limits us; they will destroy all fault anddumbness and the soul’s poverties. For theirs is the rain of theabundance of heaven and theirs the storms that set flowing therivers of life; their thunders are the chant of the hymn of the godsand the proclamations of the Truth. They are the eye that leadsus on a happy path and he who follows them shall not stumble,nor have pain nor hurt, nor decay nor die; their plenitudes arenot destroyed nor their felicities diminished; they make of man

564 Other Hymns

a seer and a king. Their vastness is the blazing of a divine Sun;they shall place us in the seats of Immortality.

Of all that was of old and of all that is new, of all thatrises from the soul and all that seeks expression they are theimpellers. They stand in the upper and the lower and the middleheaven; they have descended from the highest supreme. They areborn of the Truth; they are luminous leaders of the mind; theyshall drink the sweet wine of delight and give us the supremeinspirations. The Woman, the Divine is with them who shall putaway from us hurt and thirst and desire and refashion man’smind in the form of the godhead. Lo, these are knowers of theTruth, seers whom the Truth inspires, vast in expression, vast indiffusion, young for ever and immortal.

The God of the Mystic Wine

Rig Veda IX.75 and 42

These two hymns are rendered as literally as possible so as toshow the original symbolism of the Veda untranslated into itspsychological equivalents.

I

aEB E yAEZ pvt� cnoEhto nAmAEn yh� vo aED y�q� vD't� aA s� y'�y b� hto b� h�ED rT� Ev�v`mzhE�c0Z� � ��

1. Placed in delight he flows to the pleasant Names in whichhe increases; vast and wise he ascends the chariot of the vastsun, the chariot of a universal movement.

!t�y Ejh� vA pvt� mD� E y� v/tA pEtED'yo a�yA adA�y� dDAEt p� �� Ep�orpFQy� nAm t� tFymED rocn� Edv� � ��

2. Tongue of the Truth, a pleasant honey,1 he flows speakerand lord of this Thought and invincible; the Son places thethird hidden Name of the Parents2 in the luminous world ofHeaven.

av %� tAn� klfA& aEc+d�� EBy�'mAn� kof aA Ehr yy� aBFm� t�y dohnA an� qtA�ED E�p� �W uqso Ev rAjEt � ��

1 The sweet wine of the Soma.2 Heaven and Earth; there are three heavens and three earths and at the summit is the

triple luminous world of Heaven called Swar and described lower down as the tripleback or threefold level in the Dawn. That is the world of the “vast sun” and is itselfdescribed as the Truth, the Right, the Vast.

566 Other Hymns

3. Breaking into light he cries down into the jars, guided bymen, in the golden sheath; in him the milkings of the Truthdawn out,3 he shines wide on the triple back of the Dawn.

aEd� EB� s� to mEtEB�cnoEht� rocyn� rodsF mAtrA f� Ec� romA y4yA smyA Ev DAvEt mDoDA'rA EpvmAnA Edv�Edv� � ��

4. Pressed out by the stones, placed in delight by the thoughts,pure, making to shine out the two mothers, Earth andHeaven, he runs evenly through all the hairs of the Sheep;4

his stream of honey goes on increasing day by day.

pEr som DvA �v�ty� n� EB� p� nAno aEB vAsyAEfrm� y� t� mdA aAhnso EvhAys�t�EBErd�� cody dAtv� mGm� � "�

5. Race everywhere, O Soma, for our happiness, purified bymen clothe thyself with the mixings; with those thy rapturesthat are smiting and wide-extended, impel Indra to give hisplenty.5

II

jnyn� rocnA Edvo jny�@s� s� y'm� vsAno gA apo hEr� � ��

1. Giving birth to the luminous worlds of heaven,6 giving birthto the Sun in the waters,7 the Brilliant One clothes himselfwith the waters and the rays.8

3 Or, “to him the milkers of the Truth cry out the chant.”4 The strainer in which the Soma is purified is made of the fleece of the Ewe. Indra is the

Ram; the Ewe must therefore be an energy of Indra, probably the divinised sense-mind,indriyam.5 The Soma was mixed with water, milk and other ingredients: Soma is said to clothe

himself with the Waters and with the “cows”, that is, the illuminations or yield of Dawn,the shining Cow.6 The three worlds of Swar.7 Agni, Surya and Soma himself are said to be found in the waters or seven rivers.8 Gah. , meaning both cows and rays.

The God of the Mystic Wine 567

eq $�n mmnA d�vo d�v��y�pEr DAryA pvt� s� t� � ��

2. He by the ancient thought flows pressed out in a stream, agod around the gods.

vAv� DAnAy t� v'y� pvt� vAjsAty� somA� sh5pAjs� � ��

3. For one increasing and swiftly advancing9 there flow for hiswinning of the plenty the Soma-juices with their thousandstrengths.

d� hAn� $Em�py� pEv�� pEr EqQyt� +dd�vA& ajFjnt� � ��

4. Milked out, the ancient food, he is poured into the strainerthat purifies and shouting he brings to birth the gods.

aEB Ev�vAEn vAyA'�EB d�vA& !tAv� D� som� p� nAno aq'Et � "�

5. Soma, purifying himself, travels to all desirable boons, tothe gods who increase the Truth.

gom�� som vFrvd�vAv�Ajv�s� t� pv�v b� htFErq� � (�

6. Stream on us, O Soma, when thou art pressed out, thatin which are the Cows, the Heroes, the Steeds, the Plenty;stream impulsions vast.10

9 On the path, through all obstacles; the sacrifice is figured both as a growth of manand as a journey.10 “Large foods”, according to the ritualist commentator; as there are here two wordsmeaning food in his usual rendering, is. and vaja, he gives another meaning to vaja andexplains the verse “give us a wealth along with which there are cows, men, horses andbattle and give us plentiful food.”

The Vedic Fire

Rig Veda I.94 and 97

I

im� �tommh't� jAtv�ds� rTEmv s� mh�mA mnFqyA Bd� A Eh n� mEtr�y s�s%�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

This is the omniscient who knows the law of our being and issufficient to his works; let us build the song of his truth by ourthought and make it as if a chariot on which he shall mount.When he dwells with us, then a happy wisdom becomes ours.With him for friend we cannot come to harm.

y�m� �vmAyjs� s sAD�ynvA' 0�Et dDt� s� vFy'm� s t� tAv n�nm[o�y�hEtr�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

Whosoever makes him his priest of the sacrifice, reaches theperfection that is the fruit of his striving, a home on a height ofbeing where there is no warring and no enemies; he confirms inhimself an ample energy; he is safe in his strength, evil cannotlay its hand upon him.

fk�m �vA sEmD� sADyA EDy��v� d�vA hEvrd�yAh� tm� �vmAEd�yA& aA vh tAn� |� �m�y�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

This is the fire of our sacrifice! May we have strength to kindleit to its height, may it perfect our thoughts. In this all that wegive must be thrown that it may become a food for the gods;this shall bring to us the godheads of the infinite consciousnesswho are our desire.

The Vedic Fire 569

BrAm�2m� k� ZvAmA hvF�Eq t� Ectyt� pv'ZApv'ZA vym� jFvAtv� tr� sADyA EDyo��n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

Let us gather fuel for it, let us prepare for it offerings, let us makeourselves conscious of the jointings of its times and its seasons.It shall so perfect our thoughts that they shall extend our beingand create for us a larger life.

EvfA� gopA a�y crEt jtvo E�pQc yd� t ct� �pd/t� EB� Ec�� k�t uqso mhA& a�y�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � "�

This is the guardian of the world and its peoples, the shepherdof all these herds; all that is born moves by his rays and iscompelled by his flame, both the two-footed and the four-footedcreatures. This is the rich and great thought-awakening of theDawn within.

�vm2vy�'zt hotAEs p� 4y'� fA�tA potA jn� qA p� roEht� Ev�vA Ev�A& aAE�v'?yA DFr p� �yEs

a�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � (�

This is the priest who guides the march of the sacrifice, the firstand ancient who calls to the gods and gives the offerings; his isthe command and his the purification; from his birth he standsin front, the vicar of our sacrifice. He knows all the works ofthis divine priesthood, for he is the Thinker who increases in us.

yo Ev�vt� s� tFk� sd� �Es d� r� Ect� stE1EdvAEt rocs� rA{yAE�cdDo aEt d�v p�y�y�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � *�

The faces of this God are everywhere and he fronts all thingsperfectly; he has the eye and the vision: when we see him fromafar, yet he seems near to us, so brilliantly he shines across thegulfs. He sees beyond the darkness of our night, for his vision isdivine.

570 Other Hymns

p� vo' d�vA Bvt� s� vto rTo��mAk� f�so a�y�t� d� �� tdA jAnFtot p� �ytA vco��n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ,�

O you godheads, let our chariot be always in front, let our clearand strong word overcome all that thinks the falsehood. O yougodheads, know for us, know in us that Truth, increase thespeech that finds and utters it.

vD�d�'�f�sA& ap d� �o jEh d� r� vA y� aEt vA k� EcdE�Z� aTA y�Ay g� Zt� s� g� k� 2y�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � -�

With blows that slay cast from our path, O thou Flame, thepowers that stammer in the speech and stumble in the thought,the devourers of our power and our knowledge who leap atus from near and shoot at us from afar. Make the path of thesacrifice a clear and happy journeying.

ydy� /TA azqA roEhtA rT� vAtj� tA v� qB�y�v t� rv� aAEdvEs vEnno D� mk�t� nA��n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � �.�

Thou hast bright red horses for thy chariot, O Will divine, whoare driven by the stormwind of thy passion; thou roarest like abull, thou rushest upon the forests of life, on its pleasant treesthat encumber thy path, with the smoke of thy passion in whichthere is the thought and the sight.

aD �vnAd� t Eb�y� � ptE�Zo d� @sA yt� t� yvsAdo 4yE�Trn� s� g� tt� t� tAvk��yo rT��yo��n�sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

At the noise of thy coming even they that wing in the skies areafraid, when thy eaters of the pasture go abroad in their haste.So thou makest clear thy path to thy kingdom that thy chariotsmay run towards it easily.

The Vedic Fire 571

ay� Em��y vzZ�y DAys��vyAtA� mztA� h�1o a\� t� m� 1A s� no B� �v�qA� mn� p� nr�n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

This dread and tumult of thee, is it not the wonderful and ex-ceeding wrath of the gods of the Life rushing down on us tofound here the purity of the Infinite, the harmony of the Lover?Be gracious, O thou fierce Fire, let their minds be again sweet tous and pleasant.

d�vo d�vAnAmEs Em�o a\� to vs� v's� nAmEs cAzr2vr� fm'��yAm tv s T�tm��n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

God art thou of the gods, for thou art the lover and friend;richest art thou of the masters of the Treasure, the founders ofthe home, for thou art very bright and pleasant in the pilgrimageand the sacrifice. Very wide and far-extending is the peace of thybeatitudes; may that be the home of our abiding!

tt� t� Bd�� yt� sEmd� D� �v� dm� somAh� to jrs� m� 1y�m� dDAEs r$� d� EvZ� c dAf� q��n� sHy� mA ErqAmA vy� tv � ��

That is the bliss of him and the happiness; for then is this Willvery gracious and joy-giving when in its own divine house, litinto its high and perfect flame, it is adored by our thoughtsand satisfied with the wine of our delight. Then it lavishes itsdeliciousness, then it returns in treasure and substance all thatwe have given into its hands.

y�m� �v� s� d� EvZo ddAfo�nAgA��vmEdt� sv'tAtA y� Bd��Z fvsA codyAEs jAvtA rADsA t� �yAm � �"�s �vm�n� sOBg�v�y Ev�An�mAkmAy� � Etr�h d�v t�o Em�o vzZo mAmhtAmEdEt� EsD� � p� ETvF ut %O� � �(�

O thou infinite and indivisible Being, it is thou ever that formestthe sinless universalities of the spirit by our sacrifice; thou com-pellest and inspirest thy favourites by thy happy and luminous

572 Other Hymns

forcefulness, by the fruitful riches of thy joy. Among them maywe be numbered. Thou art the knower of felicity and the in-creaser here of our life and advancer of our being! Thou art thegodhead!

II

ap n� fof� cdGm�n� f� f� �2yA rEym� ap n� fof� cdGm� � ��

Burn away from us the sin, flame out on us the bliss. Burn awayfrom us the sin!

s� 0�E�yA s� gAt� yA vs� yA c yjAmh� ap n� fof� cdGm� � ��

For the perfect path to the happy field, for the exceeding treasurewhen we would do sacrifice, — burn away from us the sin!

yd� BEd�W eqA� A�mAkAs�c s� ry� ap n� fof� cdGm� � ��

That the happiest of all these many godheads may be born inus, that the seers who see in our thought may multiply, — burnaway from us the sin!

yt� t� a�n� s� ryo jAy�mEh t� vym� ap n� fof� cdGm� � ��

That thy seers, O Flame divine, may multiply and we be new-born as thine, — burn away from us the sin!

yd� a�n�� sh�vto Ev�vto yEt BAnv� ap n� fof� cdGm� � "�

The Vedic Fire 573

When the flaming rays of thy might rush abroad on every sideviolently, — burn away from us the sin!

�v� Eh Ev�vtom� K Ev�vt� pErB� rEs ap n� fof� cdGm� � (�

O God, thy faces are everywhere! thou besiegest us on every sidewith thy being. Burn away from us the sin!

E�qo no Ev�vtom� KAEt nAv�v pAry ap n� fof� cdGm� � *�

Let thy face front the Enemy wherever he turns; bear us in thyship over the dangerous waters. Burn away from us the sin!

s n� EsD� Emv nAvyAEt pqA' �v�ty� ap n� fof� cdGm� � ,�

As in a ship over the ocean, bear us over into thy felicity. Burnaway from us the sin!

A Vedic Hymn to the Fire

A HYMN OF THE UNIVERSAL DIVINEFORCE AND WILL1

vyA id�n� a�ny�t� ay� �v� Ev�v� am� tA mAdyt� v��vAnr nAEBrEs E0tFnA� �T� Z�v jnA& upEmd� yyT � ��

Other flames are only branches of thy stock, O Fire. All theimmortals take in thee their rapturous joy. O universal Godhead,thou art the navel-knot of the earths and their inhabitants; allmen born thou controllest and supportest like a pillar.

m� DA' Edvo nAEBrE�n� p� ET4yA aTABvdrtF rod�yo� t� �vA d�vAso�jnyt d�v� v��vAnr ?yoEtErdAyA'y � ��

The Flame is the head of heaven and the navel of the earthand he is the power that moves at work in the two worlds. OVaishwanara, the gods brought thee to birth a god to be a lightto Aryan man.

aA s� y�' n r�myo D��vAso v��vAnr� dEDr��nA vs� En yA pv't��voqDF�v@s� yA mAn� q��vEs t�y rAjA � ��

As the firm rays sit steadfast in the Sun, all treasures have beenplaced in the universal godhead and flame. King art thou of allthe riches that are in the growths of the earth and the hills andthe waters and all the riches that are in men.

1 A hymn of Nodha Gautama to Agni Vaishwanara in the Rig Veda.

A Vedic Hymn to the Fire 575

b� htF iv s� nv� rodsF Egro hotA mn� �yo n d0� �vv't� s�yf� �mAy p� vF'v�'�vAnrAy n� tmAy yh� vF� � ��

Heaven and Earth grow as if vaster worlds to the Son. He isthe priest of our sacrifice and sings our words even as might aman of discerning skill. To Vaishwanara, for this most stronggod who brings with him the light of the sun-world, its manymighty waters because his strength is of the truth.

EdvE�ct� t� b� hto jAtv�do v��vAnr ErErc� mEh�vm� rAjA k� �VFnAmEs mAn� qFZA� y� DA d�v��yo vErv�ckT' � "�

O universal godhead, O knower of all things born, thy excess ofgreatness overflows even the Great Heaven. Thou art the kingof the toiling human peoples and by battle madest the supremegood for the gods.

v��vAnro mEh7A Ev�vk� E�VB'r�Aj�q� yjto EvBAvA fAtvn�y� fEtnFEBrE�n� p� znFT� jrt� s� n� tAvAn� � *�

This is the universal godhead who by his greatness labours in allthe peoples, the lustrous master of sacrifice, the Flame with hishundred treasures. This is he who has the word of the Truth.

Parashara’s Hymns to the Lordof the Flame

1

p�vA n tAy�� g� hA ctt� nmo y� jAn� nmo vhtm� sjoqA DFrA� pd�rn� �m�� p �vA sFdEv�v� yj�A� � ��

He hides himself like a thief with the Cow of vision in thesecret cavern of being taking to himself and bearing thither ouradoration. The thinkers nurse a common joy in him in theirhearts and follow in his way by her footprints. All the Mastersof sacrifice come to thee, O Flame, in the secrecy.

!t�y d�vA an� v�tA g� B�'v�pErE�V%O'n' B� m vD'tFmAp� pvA s� EfE�vm� t�y yonA gB�' s� jAtm� � ��

The Gods follow after him the ways and works of the Truth.He shall stand encompassing the earth like heaven. The Watersincrease by their toil growing in his bulk the Flame because hewas born perfect in their womb in the house of Truth.

p� E�Vn' r vA E0Etn' p� LvF EgErn' B� ?m 0odo n f�B� a�yo nA?m�sg' t/t� EsD� n' 0od� k x vrAt� � ��

He is like delightful increase and like the wide earth ourdwelling-place. He is enjoyable like a hill and bliss-giving likefast-running water. He is like a horse in the battle-charge urgedto the gallop and like a rushing river, and who then shall hedgein his course?

jAEm� EsD� nA� B�At�v �v5AEm�yA� rAjA vnAyE� y�Atj� to vnA 4y�TAdE�nh' dAEt romA p� ET4yA� � ��

Parashara’s Hymns to the Lord of the Flame 577

He is the close comrade of the Rivers as a brother of his sisters.He devours Earth’s pleasant woods as a king devours his ene-mies. When driven by the breath of the wind he stands aboutin all the woodland, the Flame tears asunder the hairs of earth’sbody.

�vEs�y@s� h�so n sFdn� +�vA c�Et�Wo EvfAm� qB�'t� somo n v�DA !t jAt� pf� n' Ef�vA EvB� d�'r�BA� � "�

He breathes in the Waters like a seated swan. Awake in thedawn he has power by the will of his works to give knowledgeto the peoples. He is like the god of the nectar-wine and bornof Truth and a creator. He is like the Cow with her child. He isall-pervading and his light is seen from a far distance.

2

vn�q� jAy� m't�'q� Em�o v� ZFt� )� E�V� rAj�vAj� y'm� 0�mo n sAD� � +t� n' Bd� o B� v��vADFho'tA h4yvAV� � ��

He is the conqueror in the forests, he is the friend in mortals.He chooses for himself inspired knowledge as a king an unagingcouncillor. He is like a perfect good, he is like a happy will justin its thoughts. He has become to us the priest of our sacrificeand the carrier of our offerings.

h�t� dDAno n� 7A Ev�vAym� d�vADAd� g� hA EnqFdn� EvdtFm� nro EDy�DA 3dA y��VAm�A& af�sn� � ��

He holds in his hands all mights: sitting in the secret cave ofbeing he founds the gods in strength. And it is there that menwho hold the thought in their minds, when they have givenutterance to its sacred words carved into shape by the heart,discover the god.

578 Other Hymns

ajo n 0A� dADAr p� ETvF� t�tMB %A� m��EB� s�y�� E yA pdAEn p�vo En pAEh Ev�vAy� r�n� g� hA g� h� gA� � ��

He holds like one unborn the wide earth our dwelling-place andpillars heaven with the truth of the sacred words of his thinking.O Flame, thou art universal life; guard the pleasant footholds ofthe Cow of vision; watch over the herd of the rays in the secrecyof the secret cavern.

y x Eck�t g� hA BvtmA y� ssAd DArAm� t�y Ev y� c� t�y� tA spt aAEd�s� En vvAcA�m� � ��

He who has known him in the secret cave, he who has come tothe stream of the Truth, all who touch and penetrate into thethings of the Truth, to such he speaks the word of his treasures.

Ev yo vFz�s� roDmEh�vot jA ut s� �vt� EcE�rpA� dm� Ev�vAy� � s��v DFrA� s�mAy c+� � � "�

This is the Flame who besieges us with his greatness in all thegrowths of the earth and who is all the children of the worldsand who is within in all the mothers. He is knowledge in thehouse of the Waters and he is universal life. The thinkers havemeasured and constructed him like a mansion.

3

)FZ�� p �TAE;v� B� r y� � �TAt� �crTm/t� 4y� Zo't� pEr yd�qAmoko Ev�v�qAm� B� v;�vo d�vAnA� mEh�vA � ��

The Carrier of our gifts speeds on his way and reaches up to-wards heaven. He unravels out of the nights all that is stableand all that moves. This is he that becomes the one God who isaround all the gods in his greatness.


aAEd�� Ev�v� +t�� j� qt f� �kA%;�v jFvo jEn�WA� Bjt Ev�v� d�v�v� nAm !t� spto am� tm�v��

All serve with gladness thy will to works when, O God, thou artborn as the living being from a dry matter. All by thy movingsget touch of the Truth and touch of immortality and they enjoythe Name, the Godhead.

!t�y �qA !t�y DFEtEv'�vAy� Ev'�v� apA�Es c+� � y�t� �y� dAfA%o vA t� Ef0A��m� EcEk�vAn�Ey� dy�v � ��

He is the missioned impulse of Truth and the thinking of theTruth. He is the universal life and all do in him their works. Tohim who gives to thee and to him who takes of thee be knowerof the knowledge and give him his portion of thy treasure.

hotA Enq�o mnorp�y� s EcvAsA� ptF ryFZAm� iQCt r�to EmT�tn� q� s� jAnt �v�d'0�rm� rA� � ��

He is the priest of the sacrifice who is seated in the Son of Man:he is the lord of these riches. The wise desire mutually his seedin their bodies and they come altogether to know him by theirown discerning minds.

Ept� n' p� �A� +t�� j� qt )oqy� a�y fAs� t� rAs� Ev rAy aOZo'd� d� r� p� z0� � Epp�f nAk� �t� EBd'm� nA� � "�

Those who listen to his word of instruction, those who are swiftto the journey, serve gladly his will as sons the will of a father.He is the house of a multitude of riches and flings wide the doorof his felicitous treasure. He is the dweller in the home and givesform to Paradise by the light of his stars.

580 Other Hymns

4

rEyn' Ec�A s� ro n s�d� gAy� n' AZo En�yo n s� n� � t/vA n B� EZ'v'nA EsqE/t pyo n D�n� � f� EcEv'BAvA � ��

He is as if a marvellous shining riches and like the wide seeingof the sun. He is as if life and the breath of our existence and heis as if our eternal child. He is like a galloper that bears us. Hefastens on the woodlands. He gives of his substance as the cowits milk. He is wide and lustrous, he is very bright and pure.

dADAr 0�mmoko n r vo yvo n p/vo j�tA jnAnAm� !Eqn' �t� �vA Ev0� f�to vAjF n Fto vyo dDAEt � ��

He is pleasant like a home and holds all our good. He is to uslike ripe corn. He is a conqueror of men and like a chantingRishi; the word of him is among the folk. He is like an exultingsteed and he lays on us our birth to knowledge.

d� rokfoEc� +t� n' En�yo jAy�v yonAvr� Ev�v�m� Ec�o ydB�AV� C� v�to n Ev0� rTo n z_F �v�q� sm�s� � ��

He is light in a house difficult to inhabit.1 He is as an eternal willthat acts in us; he is like a wife in our chamber and sufficient toevery man. When he burns out wonderful and manifold, he isas if the white horse in the peoples. He is like a chariot made ofgold: he is like a keen flame in the battles.

s�n�v s� �VAm� dDA�y�t� n' Ed%� t� �v�q tFkA ymo h jAto ymo jEn�v� jAr� knFnA� pEtj'nFnAm� � ��

1 Or, “He is a light difficult to kindle.”


He is like an army running to the charge and puts strength in us:he is like the flaming shaft of the Archer that has a keen burningface. He is the twin that is born and the twin who is that whichis to be born. He is the lover of the virgins and the husband ofthe mothers.

t� v�crATA vy� vs�yA�t� n gAvo n0t id� Dm� EsD� n' 0od� nFcFr�no�vt gAv� �vd�'fFk� � "�

When his light is kindled, we come to him as the herds come totheir home: we come to him by your journeying, O gods, andwe come to him by your sitting still. He is like a river running inits channel and sends in front the downward Waters: the herdof the Rays move to him in the seeing of the world of the Sun.

5

f� +� f� f� /vA& uqo n jAr� p A smFcF Edvo n ?yoEt� pEr jAt� +�vA bB� T B� vo d�vAnA� EptA p� �� sn� � ��

He burns out bright as if the lover of Dawn and fills the twoequal worlds like the light of heaven. He is born by our will toworks and he comes into being all around us. He is the son andbecomes the father of the Gods.

v�DA ad� Jo aE�nEv'jAn�� Dn' gonA� �vA�A Ept� nAm� jn� n f�v aAh� y'� sm2y� Enq�o r vo d� roZ� � ��

This is the Fire that has perfect knowledge and is a creator whomnone can rend asunder. He is as if the teat of the cows of lightand the sweetness of the draughts of the wine. He is as if onehappy in the creature and must be laid hands on where he sitsblissful in the middle of the house.

p� �o n jAto r vo d� roZ� vAjF n Fto Evfo Ev tArFt� Evfo ydh� v� n� EB� snF1A aE�nd�'v�vA Ev�vAy�yA� � ��

582 Other Hymns

He is as if our rapturous son born to us in the house and he islike a courser pleased and glad that carries to safety the peoples.When I call to the Nations who dwell in one lair with the StrongOnes, the Flame enjoys all the godheads.

nEk�V etA v�tA EmnEt n� �yo yd��y� )� E�V� ckT' t�� t� d�so ydh�smAn�n�'EBy'%� /to Evv� rpA�Es � ��

None can impair the ways of thy works when thou hast cre-ated inspired knowledge for the Strong Ones. This is thy workthat yoked with the equal Gods thou smitest and scatterest thepowers of evil.

uqo n jAro EvBAvo5� s��At#pE�ck�td�m� �mnA vhto d� ro 4y� v�vt Ev�v� �vd�'fFk� � "�

Very bright and lustrous is he like the paramour of Dawn. Lethis form be known and his knowledge awake for this humanbeing, let all bear him in themselves, swing wide the gates andwalk in the vision of the world of the Sun.

6

vn�m p� vF'ryo' mnFqA aE�n� s� foko Ev�vAy�yA� aA d�4yAEn v�tA EcEk�vAnA mAn� q�y jn�y jm � ��

Men battling by our mind of thought may we make conquestof many powers and Agni burning brightly enjoy and possess inus all things that are, know the divine workings and know thebirths of the human creature.

gBo' yo apA� gBo' vnAnA� gB'�c �TAtA& gB'�crTAm� ad� O Ecd�mA atd�'roZ� EvfA� n Ev�vo am� t� �vADF� � ��


He is the child of the waters and the child of the forests and thechild of things stable and the child of things that move. He isthere for man in the stone of the mountain and within in thehouse. He is one universal to the peoples and the Immortal andthe right-thinking One.

s Eh 0pAvA& a�nF ryFZA� dAf%o a�mA ar� s� /t�� etA EcEk�vo B� mA En pAEh d�vAnA� jm mtA:�c Ev�An� � ��

The Fire is master of the nights and imparts to man sufficiency ofhis treasures by the power of perfect words. O knower, who hastknowledge of the births of the gods and knowledge of mortals,guard these earths.

vDA'y� p� vF'� 0po Ev#pA� �TAt� �c rT�!t vFtm� arAED hotA �vEn'q�� k� vEv�vAypA�Es s�yA � ��

Many nights that are different in form increase one who is themoving and the stable, one who has come from the Truth. He isa priest of sacrifice and enriches us where he sits in the world ofthe sun making our works things of truth.

goq� fE�t� vn�q� EDq� Brt Ev�v� bEl� �vZ'� Ev �vA nr� p� z�A spy'Ept� n' Ejv��Ev' v�do Brt � "�

Thou thinkest out thy hymn of utterance in the rays and in theforests and all the gods carry to us the light of the sun-world asa sacrifice. Men do thee service in the manifoldness and comebringing from thee riches of knowledge as from an aged father.

sAD� n' g� <� r�t�v f� ro yAt�v BFm��v�q� sm�s� � (�

He is like a perfecter of works, one who is a hungry seizer. Heis like a hero shooting arrows and like a terrible assailant in thebattle.

584 Other Hymns

7

up Ejv�� ftFzft� pEt� n En�y� jny� snF1A� �vsAr� �yAvFmzqFmj� q�E`�m� QCtFm� qs� n gAv� � ��

The Mothers desire and are desired by him, sisters dwelling inone mansion, and come to him with joy as to their eternal hus-band, even as the rays to the Dawn, — Dawn dusk and flushingand breaking into rich lustres.

vF1� Ecd� d� �hA Eptro n u/t�rEd�� zj�EYrso rv�Z c+� Ed'vo b� hto gAt� m�m� ah� �vEv'Evd� � k�t� m� 5A� � ��

Our fathers by their word, the Angiras seers, broke the strongand stubborn places, our fathers burst by their cry the rock ofthe mountain, made within us the path to the Great Heaven,discovered the Day and the sun-world and thought-vision andthe herds of light.

dD�� t� Dny��y DFEtmAEddyo' EdED�vo EvB� �A� at� �ytFrpso y�yQCA d�vARm ysA vD'ytF� � ��

Then the battling and thinking peoples held the Truth and en-riched the thought of the human being and bore it in all itsbreadth; unthirsting, doers of the work increasing the divinebirth by the delight-offering, their walk is towards the gods.

mTF%dF� EvB� to mAtEr�vA g� h�g� h� �y�to j�yo B� t� aAdF� rA�� n shFys� scA s�A d� �y� B� gvAZo EvvAy � ��

When Matarishwan the Breath borne variously within uschurned him into being, the Lord of Fire became the whiteand blissful one in every house. Man was a seer and kindler ofthe divine Fire and he dwelt with him like a companion and senthim on his messages like an envoy to a powerful king.


mh� yE�p� x rs� Edv� krv �sr�p� fyE�cEk�vAn� s� jd�tA D� qtA Ed%� m�m� �vAyA� d�vo d� EhtEr E�vEq� DAt� � "�

When he had made this sap of essence for the great FatherHeaven, he came down, one close in touch, one who has knowl-edge. The Archer loosed violently on him his arrow of lightning,but the god set the keen lustre in his own daughter.

�v aA y�t� �y� dm aA EvBAEt nmo vA dAfAd� fto an� %� n� vDo' a�n� vyo a�y E�bhA' yAsd� AyA srT� y� j� nAEs � (�

O Fire, increase, twofold in thy mass, the birth into knowledgeof every one who is luminous to thy flame in thy own house orgives thee worship to thy desire day by day. Whomsoever thoumakest to haste in one chariot with thee, travels with felicity ofthy riches.

aE�n� Ev�vA aEB p� 0� sct� sm� d�� n 5vt� sJ yh� vF� n jAEmEBEv' EcEkt� vyo no EvdA d�v�q� mEt� EcEk�vAn� � *�

All satisfying things join themselves to the Fire as the sevenmighty rivers join themselves to the ocean. Our birth to knowl-edge was not discovered by the companion lords of life: but thouknowest it; impart thy mind of wisdom to the gods.

aA yEdq� n� pEt� t�j aAnV� C� Ec r�to EnEq/t� %OrBFk� aE�n� fD'mnv%� y� vAn� �vA2y� jny�s� dyQc � ,�

When flaming force comes to the King of men to give himstrength, when Heaven is cast before him as a pure seed, theFire begets faultless, right-thinking, young the gods of life andhastens their armies.

mno n yo�2vn� s% e�y�k� s�A s� ro v�v If� rAjAnA Em�AvzZA s� pAZF goq� E ymm� t� r0mAZA � -�

586 Other Hymns

One who goes immediately on the paths and alone like themind, the Sun, ever is master of the treasure. The kings Mitraand Varuna with their beautiful hands are guarding delight andimmortality amid the rays.

mA no a�n� sHyA Ep{yAEZ mEq'�WA aEB Evd� �kEv� sn� nBo n #p� jErmA EmnAEt p� rA t�yA aEBf�t�rDFEh � �.�

O Flame, violate not our ancestral comradeship; be still to usa knower and a seer. Age wastes the form of man like a cloud:know before that assault on our being.

8

En kA4yA v�Ds� f�vt�kh'�t� dDAno nyA' p� #EZ aE�nB�'vd� EyptF ryFZA� s�A c+AZo am� tAEn Ev�vA � ��

He creates within us the poet-wisdoms of the eternal Creatorand holds in his hand many strengths of the gods. The Firebecomes to us a master of riches, creating together all immortalthings.

a�m� v�s� pEr qt� n EvdE�QCto Ev�v� am� tA am� rA� )my� v� pd4yo EDy�DA�t�T� � pd� prm� cAv'�n��

All the limitlessly wise immortals desired and found the Childwithin us who is everywhere around us. The gods who putthought in us toiling and travelling in his footing-places stoodin the supreme seat and they came to the delightful house of theFlame.

Et5o yd�n� frd��vAEmQC� Ec� G� t�n f� cy� spyA'n� nAmAEn Ec;EDr� yE�yAys� dyt tv� s� jAtA� � ��


When for three years they had served thee, O Fire, with theclear-offering and were pure to thy purity, then they held thesacrificial names, they sped their bodies come to perfect birth.

aA rodsF b� htF v�EvdAnA� zEd� yA jEB�r� yE�yAs� Evdmto' n�mEDtA EcEk�vAnE�n� pd� prm� tE�TvA�sm� � ��

The Masters of sacrifice discovered the vast Earth and Heavenand gathered to man the powers of the Violent One, and now themortal knows and discovers by the founder of the hemispherethe Flame where he stands in the world of his supreme session.

s�jAnAnA up sFd�EB�� p$Fvto nm�y� nm�yn� ErEr/vA�s�tv� k� vt �vA� sKA sHy� En'EmEq r0mAZA� � "�

The gods and their wives altogether knew him and they came tohim kneeling and bowed to the one who must be adored; andthey exceeded themselves and made their own divine bodies andeach friend was guarded in the gaze of his friend.

E�� sJ yd� g� |AEn �v� i�pdAEvdE�EhtA yE�yAs� t�BF r0t� am� t� sjoqA� pf� ` �TAt6 `rT� c pAEh � (�

The Masters of sacrifice found hidden in thee the thrice sevensecret seats and with one common will in their hearts they guardby them the immortality. O Fire, keep the herds and all that standand all that moves.

Ev�A& a�n� vy� nAEn E0tFnA� 4yAn� q/C� zDo jFvs� DA� atEv'�A& a2vno d�vyAnAntd� o d� to aBvo hEvvA'V� � *�

O Fire, thou knowest all the revelations of knowledge of thedwellers upon earth; hold their strengths to uninterrupted conti-nuity that they may live. And thou knowest the roads between,the paths of the gods, and thou art the sleepless messenger andthe bearer of sacrifice.

588 Other Hymns

�vA2yo Edv aA sJ yh� vF rAyo d� ro 4y� t�A ajAnn� Evdd� g4y� srmA d� �hm� v: y�nA n� k� mAn� qF Bojt� EvV� � ,�

The seven right-thinking mighty Rivers of Heaven that know theTruth knew the doors of the felicitous treasure: Sarama discov-ered the strong fortified place, the largeness, the herded mass ofthe rays, and now the human creature enjoys by that widenessof the light.

aA y� Ev�vA �vp�yAEn t�T� � k� vAnAso am� t�vAy gAt� m� m^A mhE\� p� ETvF Ev t�T� mAtA p� ��rEdEtDA'ys� v�� -�

The great gods set their steps on all things that have fair issue,making our path to immortality. Earth stood wide in her great-ness by the great Ones and the Mother Infinite came with hersons to uphold her.

aED E)y� En dD� �cAzmE�mEdvo yd0F am� tA ak� vn� aD 0rEt EsDvo n s� �VA� nFcFr�n� azqFrjAnn� � �.�

The Immortals set in him splendour and beauty when they madethe two eyes of heaven. The rivers of Truth are flowing, they havebeen let loose to their courses; their downward waters shone andknew, O Fire.

9

rEyn' y� Ept� Ev�o vyoDA� s� ZFEtE�cEkt� qo n fAs� � �yonfFrEtETn' FZAno hot�v s� EvDto Ev tArFt� � ��

A divine Fire was the treasure discovered by our fathers: he setson us our birth to knowledge and is as if the excellent leading ofa wise teacher, and he is like a guest well pleased lying happy inour house, and he is like a priest come to our house of sessionand brings to safety those that do him worship.


d�vo n y� sEvtA s�ymmA +�vA EnpAEt v� jnAEn Ev�vA p� z f�to amEtn' s�y aA�m�v f�vo EdEDqA�yo B� t� � ��

He is like the god that creates, the Sun; his thought is truth andhe guards all strengths by his will. He is a true force that isexpressed by many and is to be pondered on like a blissful self.

d�vo n y� p� ETvF� Ev�vDAyA up0�Et EhtEm�o n rAjA p� r�sd� fm'sdo n vFrA anv%A pEtj� �V�v nArF � ��

He is as if the Godhead that foundeth all things lodging on thewide earth like a king with many loving friends. He is like aband of heroes marching in our front, marching to the house ofbliss. He is like a woman faultless and beloved of her lord.

t� �vA nro dm aA En�yEmd� Dm�n� sct E0Etq� D��vAs� aED %� 7� En dD� B�'y'E�mBvA Ev�vAy� D'zZo ryFZAm� � ��

Therefore men cling to thee, O Fire, kindled eternal in the house,in the abiding worlds of thy habitation; for they have placedin thee a great light. Be our universal life; be the hold of ourtreasure.

Ev p� 0o a�n� mGvAno a�y� Ev' s� ryo ddto Ev�vmAy� � sn�m vAj� sEmT��vyo' BAg� d�v�q� )vs� dDAnA� � "�

O Fire, let the masters of the wealth enjoy thy satisfying thingsand the illumined seers, the givers the universal life. Warriors inthe clashes of the battle, let us conquer plenitude, let us set ourportion in the gods for an inspired knowledge.

!t�y Eh D�nvo vAvfAnA� �md� <F� pFpyt %� B/tA� prAvt� s� mEt� EB0mAZA Ev EsDv� smyA s5� rEd� m� � (�

The cows of the Truth, the cows enjoyed in heaven, have givenus to drink lowing with happy udders; its rivers have flowed

590 Other Hymns

evenly over the mountain and claim right thinking as an almsfrom the Truth’s supreme region.

�v� a�n� s� mEt� EB0mAZA EdEv )vo dEDr� yE�yAs� n/tA c c+� zqsA Ev#p� k� �Z� c vZ'mzZ� c s� D� � � *�

O Fire, praying in thee for right thinking as for an alms fromon high, the masters of sacrifice set inspired knowledge in theheavens: they made night and day of two different forms andjoined together the black and the rosy hue.

yAn�Ay� mtA'�s� q� do a�n� t� �yAm mGvAno vy� c CAy�v Ev�v� B� vn� Ess�yApE vAn� rodsF atEr0m� � ,�

The mortals whom thou makest to haste to felicity, make us ofthem, even us and the masters of riches. Fill earth and air andheaven; cling to the whole world like a shadow.

av'E\r�n� av'to n� EBn6'vFr�vF'rAvn� yAmA �votA� IfAnAs� Ept� Ev��y rAyo Ev s� ry� ftEhmA no a�y� � � -�

O Fire, give us thy protection; may we vanquish their war-horsesby our war-horses, their strong men by our strong men, theirheroes by our heroes: may the seers have the mastery of theriches discovered by our fathers and may they enjoy them livinga hundred winters.

etA t� a�n ucTAEn v�Do j� �VAEn st� mns� 3d� c fk�m rAy� s� D� ro ym� t��ED )vo d�vB/t� dDAnA� � �.�

O creator, O Fire, may these words be pleasant to thy mind andto thy heart. Let our yoke be firm and our strength control thereins of thy opulence; let us hold the inspired knowledge that isenjoyed by the gods.

Appendix

The following letter was written in response to criticismsof the opening chapter of The Secret of the Veda madein a review of the first issue of the Arya. The reviewappeared in the Hindu of Madras on 24 August 1914.Sri Aurobindo’s letter was written on 26 August andpublished the next day in the Hindu.

Interpretation of the Veda

MR. AUROBINDO GHOSE writes to us from Pondicherry: —

While thanking you for the generous appreciation in yourreview of the “Arya”, may I also crave the indulgence of yourcolumns, — if indeed you can spare so much space at such atime when the whole world is absorbed in the gigantic homicidalconflict convulsing Europe, — for an answer to your criticismson my “Secret of the Veda”, or rather to an explanation of mystandpoint which the deficiencies of my expression and the briefand summary character of my article in the “Arya” have ledyou, in some respects, to misconceive?

Surely, I have nowhere said that “knowledge of which noorigin can be traced to previous sources must necessarily bedisregarded or discarded”! That would be indeed a monstrousproposition! My point was that such knowledge, when it ex-pressed a developed philosophy and psychology, stood in needof historical explanation, — a very different matter. If we acceptthe European idea of an evolving knowledge in humanity, —and it is on that basis that my argument proceeded — we mustfind the source of the Brahmavada either in an extraneous originsuch as a previous Dravidian culture — a theory which I cannotadmit, since I regard the so-called Aryans and Dravidians as onehomogeneous race — or in a previous development, of which therecords have either been lost or are to be found in the Veda itself.I cannot see how this argument involves a regressus ad infinitumexcept in so far as the whole idea of evolution and progressivecausality lies open to that objection. As to the origins of the Vedicreligion, that is a question which cannot be solved at present forlack of data. It does not follow that it had no origins or in otherwords that humanity was not prepared by a progressive spiritualexperience for the Revelation.

594 Appendix

Again, I certainly did not intend to express my own ideain the description of the Upanishads as a revolt of philosophicminds against the ritualistic materialism of the Vedas. If I heldthat view, I could not regard the earlier Sruti as an inspiredscripture or the Upanishads as Vedanta and I would not havetroubled myself about the secret of the Veda. It is a view held byEuropean scholars and I accepted it as the logical consequence,if the ordinary interpretations of the hymns, whether Indianor European, are to be maintained. If the Vedic hymns are, asrepresented by Western scholarship, the ritualistic compositionsof joyous and lusty barbarians the Upanishads “have then to beconceived as a revolt . . . against the ritualistic materialism ofthe Vedas.” From both premiss and conclusion I have dissentedand I have finally described, not only the Upanishads, but alllater forms, as a development from the Vedic religion and not arevolt against its tenets.

Our Indian doctrine avoids the difficulty in another way, byinterpreting the Veda as a book of ritual hymns and revering it asa book of knowledge. It puts together two ancient truths withoutreconciling them effectively. In my view, that reconciliation canonly be effected by seeing even in the exterior aspect of thehymns not a ritualistic materialism, but a symbolic ritualism.No doubt the karmakanda was regarded as an indispensablestepping-stone to the knowledge of the Atman. That was anarticle of religious faith, and as an article of faith I do not disputeits soundness. But it becomes valid for the intellect — and in anintellectual inquiry I must proceed by intellectual means, — onlyif the karmakanda is so interpreted as to show how its perfor-mance assists, prepares or brings about the higher knowledge.Otherwise, however much the Veda may be revered in theory,it will be treated in practice as neither indispensable nor helpfuland will come in the end to be practically set aside — as hasactually happened.

I am aware that some hymns of the Veda are interpretedin a sense other than the ritualistic; even the European scholarsadmit higher religious and spiritual ideas in the “later hymns”of the Vedas. I am aware also that separate texts are quoted

Interpretation of the Veda 595

in support of philosophical doctrines. My point was that suchexceptional passages do not alter the general tone and purportgiven to the hymns in the actual interpretations we possess. Withthose interpretations, we cannot use the Rig Veda as a whole,as the Upanishads can be used as a whole, as the basis of a highspiritual philosophy. Now, it is to the interpretation of the Vedaas a whole and to its general character that I have addressedmyself.

I quite acknowledge that there has always been a side-streamof tendency making for the adhyatmic interpretation of the Vedaeven as a whole. It would be strange if in a nation so spirituallyminded such attempts had been entirely lacking. But still theseare side-currents and have not received general recognition. Forthe Indian intellect in general, there are only two interpretations,Sayana’s and the European. Addressing myself to that generalopinion, it is with these two that I am practically concerned.

I am still of the opinion that the method and results of theearly Vedantins differed entirely from the method and results ofSayana, for reasons I shall give in the second and third num-bers of “Arya”. Practically, not in theory, what is the result ofSayana’s commentary? What is the general impression it leaveson the mind? Is it the impression of “Veda”, a great Revela-tion, a book of highest knowledge? Is it not rather that whichthe European scholars received and from which their theoriesstarted, a picture of primitive worshippers praying to friendlygods, friendly but of a doubtful temper, gods of fire, rain, wind,dawn, night, earth and sky, for wealth, food, oxen, horses, gold,the slaughter of their enemies, even of their critics, victory inbattle, the plunder of the conquered? And if so, how can suchhymns be an indispensable preparation for the Brahmavidya?Unless, indeed, it is a preparation by contraries, by exhaustionor dedication of the most materialistic and egoistic tendencies,somewhat as the grim old Hebrew Pentateuch may be describedas a preparation for the mild evangel of Christ. My position isthat they were indispensable not by a mechanical virtue in thesacrifice, but because the experiences to which they are the keyand which were symbolised by the ritual, are necessary to an

596 Appendix

integral knowledge and realisation of Brahman in the universeand prepare the knowledge and realisation of the transcendentBrahman. They are, to paraphrase Shankara’s description, minesof all knowledge, knowledge on all the planes of consciousness,and do fix the conditions and relations of the divine, the humanand the animal element in the being.

I do not claim that mine is the first attempt to give anadhyatmic interpretation of the Veda. It is an attempt — thefirst or the hundredth matters little — to give the esoteric andpsychological sense of the Veda based throughout on the mostmodern method of critical research. Its interpretation of Vedicvocables is based on a re-examination of a large part of the fieldof comparative Philology and a reconstruction on a new basiswhich I have some hope will bring us nearer to a true scienceof Language. This I propose to develop in another work, the“Origins of Aryan Speech”. I hope also to lead up to a recoveryof the sense of the ancient spiritual conceptions of which oldsymbol and myth give us the indications and which I believe tohave been at one time a common culture covering a great partof the globe with India, perhaps, as a centre. In its relation tothis methodical attempt lies the only originality of the “Secretof the Veda”.

The Hindu, 27 August 1914

Note on the Texts

Note on the Texts

In August 1914, Sri Aurobindo began to publish The Secret of theVeda in the first issue of the philosophical review Arya. This series wasaccompanied by a related one, Selected Hymns. Selected Hymns wasfollowed a year later by Hymns of the Atris. These works, written andpublished in monthly instalments between 1914 and 1917, form PartsOne to Three of the present volume.

Besides Selected Hymns and Hymns of the Atris, other Vedic trans-lations appeared in the Arya at various times between 1915 and 1920.They were usually introduced when a page or two had to be filled atthe end of a 64-page issue. These translations have been placed in theorder of their original publication in Part Four, “Other Hymns”.

Thus this volume contains all writings on and translations of theVeda published by Sri Aurobindo in the Arya. Some of what appearedin the Arya was prefigured by essays, translations and notes on theVeda written between 1912 and 1914. However, none of this earliermaterial was incorporated directly in the works that came out in theArya. Sri Aurobindo’s manuscript writings on the Veda are included inVedic Studies with Writings on Philology, volume 14 of THE COMPLETE

WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO. His translations of hymns to Agni arepublished in volume 16, Hymns to the Mystic Fire.

The Secret of the Veda. This, Sri Aurobindo’s most important exposi-tory work on the Veda, appeared in the Arya in twenty-four consecutiveinstalments between August 1914 and July 1916. (The second chapterwas printed in two instalments.) Sri Aurobindo never revised it, apartfrom minor alterations in Chapter 17. The last instalment of this workin the Arya ended with the following footnote:

We propose for the present to discontinue the Secret of theVeda so as to make room in the third year of the Arya forother matter, but we shall subsequently resume and completethe series.


Sri Aurobindo never found time to resume the series, and left TheSecret of the Veda incomplete.

Selected Hymns. These thirteen translations with commentaries werepublished in the first twelve issues of the Arya, from August 1914 toJuly 1915. (Two appeared in the first issue.) A footnote at the beginningof the first instalment, explaining the nature of the translations, isprinted as an Author’s Note in the present edition. At the end of thelast instalment, Sri Aurobindo noted that he had selected “a few briefand easy hymns” with the idea of “explaining by actual examples thesecret of the Veda”, but that “other translations of a more generalcharacter” would be necessary to show that this was “the pervadingsense and teaching of the Rig Veda.” It was evidently for this purposethat he began Hymns of the Atris in the next issue of the Arya.

Hymns of the Atris. In July 1915, Sri Aurobindo announced in “The‘Arya’s’ Second Year” that he intended, from the following issue,

to replace the Selected Hymns by a translation of the Hymnsof the Atris (the fifth Mandala of the Rig Veda) so conceivedas to make the sense of the Vedic chants at once and easilyintelligible without the aid of a commentary to the generalreader.

Hymns of the Atris began to appear in the Arya in August 1915 andcontinued until December 1917. This work consists of translations oftwo series of Suktas (“hymns”) from the fifth Mandala (“book”) of theRig Veda, along with introductory chapters, a summary of each hymnand interpretative notes. The introductory chapters consist of a fore-word, a general introduction entitled “The Doctrine of the Mystics”,and two essays on the gods to whom the hymns are addressed: “Agni,the Divine Will-Force” and “The Guardians of the Light”. The fifthMandala of the Rig Veda comprises eighty-seven hymns composed byRishis of the Atri clan. Sri Aurobindo translated forty-three of these:all twenty-eight hymns to Agni (V.1 – 28), all eleven hymns to Mitra-Varuna (V.62 – 72), both hymns to Usha (V.79, 80), the hymn to SuryaSavitri (V.81) already translated and commented upon in SelectedHymns, and a hymn to Varuna (V.85), rendered in two versions to showits “exoteric” as well as its “esoteric” sense. (See also “A Hymn of the

Note on the Texts 601

Thought-Gods” in the next section.) Sri Aurobindo later retranslatedthe hymns to Agni from the fifth Mandala; the versions that appearedin the Arya are reproduced here, while the revised translations arepublished in Hymns to the Mystic Fire.

Other Hymns. These sixteen translations from various books of theRig Veda were published in the Arya at different times between 1915and 1920. They are reproduced here in the order in which they orig-inally appeared. The last nine form a series. Apart from two pairs ofrelated hymns, the rest have no obvious connection with each other,but illustrate a wide range of approaches to rendering the Veda intoEnglish.

A Vedic Hymn (Rig Veda VII.60). This translation of a hymn ofVasishtha to Surya and Mitra-Varuna, arranged in three paragraphs,was published in the Arya in August 1915.

A Hymn of the Thought-Gods. Published in the Arya in February1916. This is not a translation but a paraphrase of the hymns tothe Maruts by the Rishi Shyavashwa of the Atri clan; it is based onRig Veda V.52 and, in the last three paragraphs, on scattered versesfrom V.53 – 61. It appeared in the Arya while Hymns of the Atris wasrunning, but did not form part of that series.

The God of the Mystic Wine (Rig Veda IX.75, 42). Published in theArya in September 1916. These two hymns to Soma were “renderedas literally as possible”, in contrast to the method of interpretativetranslation usually employed in the Arya. The Sanskrit text in translit-eration was printed at the bottom of the page in the Arya. It has beenreplaced in this edition by the text in Devanagari before each verse, ashas been supplied for the other translations.

The Vedic Fire (Rig Veda I.94, 97). These two hymns to Agni werepublished in the Arya in September 1917. In translating the first hymn,Sri Aurobindo joined the first half of the last verse with the precedingverse. He omitted the second half of the verse, a formula which occursat the end of most of the hymns of Kutsa Angirasa and is unrelated tothe rest of this hymn.

A Vedic Hymn to the Fire (Rig Veda I.59). Published in the Aryain January 1920, after a gap of two years during which no Vedictranslations came out in the review. The translation is missing the


sixth verse, probably due to lack of space on the last page of the Aryaissue. A complete translation is published in Hymns to the Mystic Fire.

Parashara’s Hymns to the Lord of the Flame (Rig Veda I.65 – 73).These nine hymns were published in the Arya in February, June, Julyand August 1920. They were numbered from 1 to 9 in the order of theirappearance: I.65, 67, 68, 66 and 69 – 73. Subsequently Sri Aurobindorevised them for inclusion in Hymns to the Mystic Fire (1946). Inthe present volume they are reproduced as originally published in theArya, in the order indicated above.

Appendix: Interpretation of the Veda. This letter was written on 26August 1914, according to an entry in Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga.In the letter, Sri Aurobindo addressed himself to some remarks on histheory of Vedic interpretation made in an article that appeared in theHindu, a daily newspaper of Madras, on 24 August. The Hindu printedSri Aurobindo’s letter on the 27th under the title “Interpretation of theVeda”. The present text has been checked against the files of the Hindu.

Publishing history. After their appearance in the Arya, none of thewritings in this volume were reprinted during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime.He expressed some dissatisfaction with them in their existing state andwished to revise them thoroughly before allowing them to be publishedin book-form. As early as 1920 he wrote to someone who wished totranslate The Secret of the Veda into Gujarati:

The “Secret of the Veda” is not complete and there are besidesmany imperfections and some errors in it which I would havepreferred to amend before the book or any translation waspublished.

In the Foreword to the first edition of Hymns to the Mystic Fire(1946), Sri Aurobindo explained why The Secret of the Veda and theaccompanying translations had not been reprinted:

The interpretation I have put forward was set out at lengthin a series of articles with the title “The Secret of the Veda”in the monthly philosophical magazine, “Arya”, some thirtyyears ago; written in serial form while still developing thetheory and not quite complete in its scope or composed on

Note on the Texts 603

a preconceived and well-ordered plan it was not published inbook-form and is therefore not yet available to the readingpublic. It was accompanied by a number of renderings of thehymns of the Rig Veda which were rather interpretations thantranslations. . . .

Finally, when it was proposed in 1949 to bring out The Secret of theVeda as a book, Sri Aurobindo dictated in reply:

The publication of the Secret of the Veda as it is does not enterinto my intention. It was published in a great hurry and at atime when I had not studied the Rig Veda as a whole as wellas I have since done. Whole chapters will have to be rewrittenor written otherwise and a considerable labour gone through;moreover it was never finished and considerable additions inorder to make it complete are indispensable.

Sri Aurobindo never found time for the necessary revision. After hispassing, however, aware of the value of the material that had appearedin the Arya, the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre pub-lished in 1956 The Secret of the Veda, Selected Hymns, Hymns ofthe Atris, and seven of the “Other Hymns” under the title On theVeda. A new edition of the same text was brought out by the samepublisher (renamed Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education)in 1964. Both these editions included as an appendix an essay from SriAurobindo’s manuscripts, “The Origins of Aryan Speech”.

In 1971, most of the same material was published as The Secret ofthe Veda, volume 10 of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. Inthat edition, “The Doctrine of the Mystics” was omitted from Hymnsof the Atris and printed in full in Hymns to the Mystic Fire, in placeof the excerpt originally included in that book; the section of “OtherHymns” was augmented by the reproduction of a number of transla-tions from Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts; and the letter “Interpretationof the Veda” was added. The Centenary edition has been reprintedseveral times.

The present edition. The Secret of the Veda with Selected Hymns differsin content from earlier editions of the corresponding book (On theVeda and The Secret of the Veda) in that it contains all writings on


and translations of the Veda published by Sri Aurobindo in the Arya.Writings reproduced from manuscripts in previous editions — “TheOrigins of Aryan Speech” and certain translations — have been placedin a new volume, Vedic Studies with Writings on Philology. “TheDoctrine of the Mystics” has been restored to the text of Hymns of theAtris. The series entitled “Parashara’s Hymns to the Lord of the Flame”is reproduced for the first time since it appeared in the Arya; the revisedtranslations of these hymns brought out by Sri Aurobindo in 1946remain in Hymns to the Mystic Fire. Three other Arya translations ofhymns to Agni, omitted from The Secret of the Veda in 1971 whenthey were added to Hymns to the Mystic Fire, are also reproduced inthe present volume. All texts have been carefully checked against theArya.

Vedic quotations. Vedic quotations and references have beenchecked against a standard edition of the Rig Veda and corrected ifnecessary. Sri Aurobindo sometimes adapted Sanskrit quotations tosuit his context, particularly with regard to case endings, number andword order. Moreover, he often separated the words in transliterationfor clarity or for metrical reasons. (See his remarks on pp. 17 – 18concerning the “euphonic combination of separate words” in theVeda.) Where other discrepancies were found, the received text of theRig Veda has generally been followed.

In The Secret of the Veda (Part One), Sri Aurobindo often iden-tified quotations from the Rig Veda by references to the Mandala,Sukta and Rik. In passages where most quotations are so identified,the editors have supplied missing references in parentheses accordingto Sri Aurobindo’s own style. But in other texts, where Sri Aurobindoprovided few or no references, references have not been inserted inthis edition. This applies in particular to the chapters introducing thetranslations in Part Three — especially “The Guardians of the Light”,where the Arya text contains dozens of unidentified Vedic allusions andquotations, with or without the use of quotation marks. The sourcesof these are identified in a table in the reference volume (volume 35)for the convenience of readers who wish to consult the original verses.

In Parts Two to Four, the Samhita text of the translated hymnshas been supplied in Devanagari (without accents), as in the previousedition.

the secret of the veda - sri aurobindo ashram

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